Posted by
Patrick Bohan on Thursday, November 05, 2009 10:09:18 AM
As the latest versions of the House and Senate health care reform bills are revealed, it is worth looking at why the liberals are at war with private insurance companies. The Democrats and the Obama Administration have been going after private insurance companies since the start of the health care reform debate. They have been painting them as evil profiteers that neglect patients by refusing preexisting conditions, dropping patients, refusing to cover preventive tests, and rationing care. Sure, some of this may be true to a certain extent, but there are obvious fallacies in these claims.
Actually, government run Medicare rations and denies coverage more readily than the insurance companies. So one may only assume that coverage under ObamaCare will be worse than coverage from private insurance companies. However, the real fallacy about private insurance companies is there profit margins. According to the Census Bureau’s second quarter 2009 profit margins by industry, private insurance companies ranked 87th out of 215 sectors analyzed. They had a profit margin of 3.5% compared to the average of 2.2%. United Health Group ranked as the number one profit business in the private insurance sector at 4.1%. This is nothing compared to the profit margins of conglomerates such as Google at 20.6% and Microsoft at 24.9%. Many other health care industries had much higher profit margins than private insurance companies. Health Care information had a profit margin of 9.4%, Home Health Care was at 8.5%, Medical Labs at 8.2%, and Generic Drug Makers was at 6.5%. All of this said, most of the burden in health care reform legislation is on the insurance industries while other health care sectors are given a pass.
One sector in health care reform getting a pass by the Democrats are the big pharmaceutical companies who ranked number 7 in profit margins at 16.5%. This sector was led by Johnson and Johnson that had a profit margin of a whopping 20.8%. It simply makes no sense to try to cut profits of an industry sector that is already struggling, while giving a pass to an industry that is extremely profitable. Even big oil and gas companies, whose profits are constantly being scrutinized by liberals, had profit margins nearly half of that of big pharmaceutical companies at 9.7%. This is nothing considering the Brewer’s sector profit margin was 26% and the Cigarette sector was at 17.4%. Apparently, liberal attacks against big business profits are random and illogical.
Thus, one may conclude, creating a government run private option to provide more competition against private insurance companies, may indeed force many insurance companies out of business since their profit margins are already slim. Also, by forcing private insurance companies to accept people with preexisting conditions and improve coverage will also eat into their slim profit margins. This proves that the goal of the White House and liberal legislators is to force private insurance companies out of business. This will pave the way to a one payer government controlled system using the dreaded public option.
So what makes insurance companies evil in liberal eyes? Since the real reason cannot be profit or shoddy coverage since government run Medicare is worse, the only logical explanation is that they are in the way of government run socialized medicine.
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