Op-ed views and opinions expressed are solely those of the author.
No one likes insurance companies — trying to get them to pay a claim is like wrenching a bone out of a dog’s clenched teeth — and now we have another reason to hold them in low regard. The biggest advocate for blowing another $1 trillion hole in the federal budget is the health insurance lobby.
The giant insurance companies — including UnitedHealthcare, Blue Cross Blue Shield, and Humana are leading what Capitol Hill sources describe as “an unprecedented lobbying blitz to restore hundreds of billions in taxpayer-funded Obamacare and Medicare Advantage subsidies.”
Brian Blase, a longtime health care expert who worked in the Trump White House, calculates that most of the reimbursement money wouldn’t financially benefit patients. The premium subsidies would mostly go straight into the bank accounts of the mega insurers.
The dirty little secret of the health care system, since Obamacare was enacted back in 2010, is that the big jackpot winner has been the insurance industry. Their stock has risen roughly four times faster than average for the stock indexes.
By some estimates, this budgetary money grab is worth $30 billion to $50 billion to the insurance lobby.
This raises the question of whether most health insurance spending is really needed at all. If every American simply had a catastrophic coverage plan that would avoid families going bankrupt due to cancer or a terrible accident, we could simply pay our routine health bills the way we pay for rent or groceries — and then cut out the insurance middleman.
Patients would shop around for the lowest prices, and health insurance would be like home fire insurance: there to aid families in an emergency.
Instead, the insurance companies are adding hundreds of billions of extraneous profits out of the health care system because Americans are over-insured.
Ironically, when Obamacare was originally hatched back in 2010, opponents, including many of your loyal Unleash Prosperity editors, warned that the endgame was a single-payer government-run system that would eliminate the private insurance industry middleman. That’s exactly the outcome the $3 trillion health care system is barreling toward.
But sooner rather than later, the Bernie Sanders Democrats are going to make their case that the vulturous insurance lobby is an unnecessary trillion-dollar expense to the health care chain.
If Democrats and Republicans can agree on anything, it’s that all Americans would be richer and healthier without this health insurance scam.
Stephen Moore is a former Trump senior economic adviser and the cofounder of Unleash Prosperity, which advocates for education freedom for all children.
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