Democratic Primaries

But health insurance companies add nothing of value to medical care, and subtract something of value from the pool of monies devoted to medical care.

Insurance is a wager. If you insure, say, against theft, you are betting someone will abscond with your possessions, and the insurance company is betting no one will do that to you. If the company has calculated the odds correctly, the pool of money it collects as premiums will be greater than the sums it must pay out when it loses that bet, and the difference will pay the costs of collecting and administering the pool, and the profit of the firm. The cost of collecting and administering may be considered of value, but save as enticement to invest in the firm, the profit is of no particular use to anyone --- it is simply the bookie's fee.

When this is applied to payment for medical care, it is not possible to argue sensibly that the profit of the firm is anything but a species of surcharge on every payment to a health care provider. Necessarily, either the doctor is being paid too little or the patient is paying too much, for otherwise there could be no profit to the firm. Worse, the health insurance industry have justly gained a reputation as dishonest bookies, as welshers, who attempt to wriggle out of payment when their bet that a policy-holder will not get sick comes a cropper. Firms comb through the policy for the slightest thing they can hang a cancellation on, and people with cancer have their policies cancelled because they did not report a hang-nail twenty years ago on their application. Further, they seek to restrict treatments a patient may receive in their own interests. A harried nurse-practioner at a phone bank may over-rule a doctor concerning treatment of a patient, usually for no better reason than the expense of the treatment to the company, and does so without regard for what may well be a life or limb outcome to the patient denied the treatment the doctor prescribes. And into the bargain, doctors are saddled with appreciable costs of administration in order to deal with various insurance firms, and to ensure they are properly paid, which they cannot honestly expect they will be. These costs, too, are a dead loss, save as they go to clerical salaries, and these costs can be reckoned to include a doctor's time, which he or she may need to devote to considering and directing how the office deals with the firm. There is simply no room for doubt the health insurance industry, as presently constituted in this country, inflates the total costs of health care by an appreciable amount.





"From Bernie’s perspective, dropping out of a race once you have no chance of winning is peculiar behavior that can only be explained by the work of a hidden hand. For most politicians, though, it is actually standard operating procedure. Only Sanders seems to think the normal thing to do once voters have made clear they don’t want to nominate you is to continue campaigning anyway."





"When things are not called by their right names, what is said cannot make sense. When what is said does not make sense, what is planned cannot succeed. When plans do not succeed, people become uneasy. When people are uneasy, punishments do not fit crimes. When punishments do not fit crimes, people cannot know where to put hand or foot."