Well, it looks like those of us who warned that the hopey changey rhetoric out of the health insurance industry last week was probably going to turn out to be bullshit were right:
One week after the nation's health insurance lobby pledged to President Obama to do what it can to constrain rising health costs, Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina is putting the finishing touches on a public message campaign aimed at killing a key plank in Obama's reform platform.
As part of what it calls an "informational website," the company has hired an outside PR company to make a series of videos sounding the alarm about a government-sponsored health insurance option, known as the public plan.
The private insurance industry is afraid that if it has to compete with a public, not-for-profit plan, it will lose that competition. Why is the industry so afraid? Because it knows that when you cut out profit, paperwork, and administrative costs as public plans do, those public plans are able to drive down costs way below the bloated private insurers.
And so here comes the predictable attacks. The only question is why President Obama ever tried to engage these sharks in the first place? If one of the fundamental problems of our current health care system is the existence of private insurance middlemen, why should those middlemen have a seat at the table when talking about fixing the system?
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