"Opening up the health insurance market to more vigorous nationwide competition, as we have done over the last decade in banking, would provide more choices of innovative products less burdened by the worst excesses of state-based regulation."
-- John McCain (John McBush, George W. McCain, Johnya)

If there ever an advertisement for a different approach to providing a way for people to pay medical bills, that would be it. The geniuses whose greed destroyed our nation's financial industry, who put our country on the brink of economic collapse in the 1920s and again in the 2000s, should be the model for health care - and in the same ways.

Healthy businesses and consumer confidence and wealth are what drive an economy. Dysfunctional businesses are what destroy an economy. Regulation of businesses is not intended to usher in socialism or to redistribute wealth, or any such thing. Regulation of businesses serves to protect businesses from, well, themselves.

We had regulations that protected the financial industry from itself, from the greed that is all too often lurking. Those regulations worked well for 50 years. We had no major economic meltdowns like those in the 1920s.

In the mid-1980s, the de-regulators won a small victory, and unleashed the savings & loan industry in a small way. Within a few years, the S&Ls had a large-scale financial collapse, and taxpayers paid billions of dollars to bail out the S&Ls. By the way, two names that were near the top of the list of wrong-doers were John McCain and Neil Bush (yes, of those Bushes). McCain survived with merely a reprimand. Bush survived with a huge paid-for-by-taxpayers fortune. Look up "Keating 5" for details.

Over the next 20 years, the de-regulators won many more victories. Look at the results: just read the newspaper, watch the news on TV. The greedy few destroyed the rest AND put the entire nation in jeopardy.

And then there is the health care biz. The one to which we should trust not only our money, but our health as well.... the one which would do a better job if less regulated against its own excesses.

The wackos love to rail on about how terrible it would be to have faceless bureaucrats getting between patients and doctors, having paper pushers making medical decisions that override the wisdom of health care professionals. Right on, Bro! But before you continue believing that ridiculous line, consider the following:

1. [smack wacko upside the head] Medicare has worked spectacularly well for 40 years. Patients pay premiums and chose their own doctors, doctors make medical decisions, and a single payer handles the financial part. It's a win-win-win for medial services providers, for consumers, and for taxpayers. Of course, if you are a for-profit health insurance carrier, you view Medicare as a competitor - one to be squashed by government action.
   
2. [smack 'em again] Not all private medical insurance is managed by for-profit companies. Before there were for-profit health insurance vendors there were the non-profit carriers: medical associations and 'mutual' insurance companies. The pre-profit system of medical insurance worked just fine.
3. Among consumers, the least 'popular' part of the for-profit medical biz is the for-profit MO.
4. The biggest problems with for-profit insurers and HMOs is that in their quest for profit (which is not necessarily a bad thing), they seek to ration health care to only the healthy and to the wealthy.
   
   In doing so, the for-profit health insurance industry employs faceless bureaucrats, paper pushers who make medical decisions that override the wisdom of health care professionals.

Instead of having employees whose job it is to facilitate the process of treating people who need health care, the for-profit insurers hire people whose job it is to deny treatment. In Congressional hearings a few years ago, an MD who for worked for a for-profit insurer as one of those benefit deniers pointed out that that any claim paid was considered to be a loss.

I know that I'm living in the past, but when I was part of the insurance industry, we considered a (non-fraud) claim paid as a success story. Our customers hired us to assume their risk, and by golly, every legitimate claim we paid meant that we were doing what our customers paid us to do.

Back then claims adjusters attempted to ensure that a claim was legitimate. Nowadays that job has devolved into looking for angles and loopholes, for ways to deny claims, and to not pay medical care providers and the patients for those very things for which the patient pays insurance premiums.

Yes, the wackos are correct on one point: it's a bad thing to have paper pushers making medical decisions that override the wisdom of health care professionals.

Sadly, the wackos have swallowed the falsehood that government-paid bureaucrats - people who have no vested interest in denying claims - are the problem. The real problem is bureaucrats whose jobs depend on their ability to deny those claims - and they do it by being paper pushers who medical decisions that override the wisdom of health care professionals.

Isn't it ironic?