Tuesday, October 26, 2010

Obamacare Feeds Insurance Oligarchs

Amplify’d from c4ss.org

Today, a Wall Street Journal opinion column titled Big Business, Big Medicine reports the “turn toward consolidation among insurance companies,” a “dynamic [that] is leading to much larger hospital systems and physician groups, and fewer insurers dominated by a handful of national conglomerates.” If this seems an anomalous result from an administration thought to represent a departure from the corporate cronyism of its predecessor, then the blatant and contrary writing on the wall was apparently ignored.

Like all regulations declaredly subduing Big Business predominance over consumer’s lives, the new laws synthesize “public” and “private” — both of which are ultimately meaningless is our system — boosting an already corporatist economy for health services. As we might have foreseen, the politicians’ solution nurtures a condition whereby smaller “carriers will collapse under the new mandates and higher overhead.” So in the face of everything the President said about “not accept[ing] the status quo as a solution” in health care, “Obamacare” delivered for Big Insurance, a cartel that loathes competition and welcomes impenetrable regulation. Both the state and Big Business — adversaries only in the popular imagination — are triumphant, the coordination of the two saddling us with another shakedown scheme.

The United States’ health care system, a teetering house of cards that will ultimately implode, exists through economic fallacy. Even so, by the time the elites’ scheme withers, they will have already thieved more than enough from the productive class; they will, as always, leave insolvency and beggary behind, but they’ll benefit from the presumption that their hearts were in the right place in trying to give health care to everyone. The insurance lobby is getting what it paid for with these policies and this President. We can inaccurately call this process of fraud and favoritism a free market, or we accept that such are the contours of American Capitalism and subscribe to free markets as a means of disbanding these price-fixing protection rackets.

Read more at c4ss.org