There is a big surprise in store for those people, and it will not be a surprise they like: Whatever else happens, the status quo is not coming back.
If health reform fails, within five years, I believe we will all look back on the last decade in health care as ??the good old days. ?
And Democrats will get the lion's share of the blame in 2010 and 2012 for failing to pass health care reform legislation in 2009.
If health reform fails, I think we will see dramatic increases in health insurance premiums starting in 2010. ??Health insurances prices were going to go up anyway, ? opponents will say. ??Prices always go up. We expected that. ?
Not like this. Here's why. The health insurance lobby has spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying to defeat health care reform. If they succeed, they will want to get their money back fast. And they will get it back ?? from you.
That's not all. All this talk about reform has increased the systematic risk of being in the health insurance business. And that is risk for which companies demand to be paid. After all, most health insurance companies are not in the health care business; they are in the insurance business. They get paid to produce healthy balance sheets, not healthy people.
Premiums will zoom out of control for still another reason: insurance companies will raise prices because they can; because our Congress members let them. If the measures that would control industry revenues and profits ?? including a robust public option ?? are defeated, then there will be no competitive control, and little statutory control, on insurance company revenues and profits for the foreseeable future.
In effect, the failure of health reform legislation will tell the insurance industry that it's okay for them to keep doing what they have been doing all along, and to do more of the same. And for insurance companies, that is like being given a Double-0 License to Kill. It's a fitting analogy: making a killing is precisely what they have in mind. Even if they have to kill 45,000 people a year to do it.
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