How bumbling-stumbling-fumbling Government suddenly threatened America’s medical-industrial complex

Our current Republican leaders apparently enjoy gazing lovingly at their big fat 3-tiered chocolate cake while devouring its very yumminess too.  How else can you explain their sudden and dramatic insistence that a government-run “public option” as part of health care reform will compete unfairly and essentially drive the insurance industry out of the medical business?

Come on!  People!  We’re talking about Guv’ment here!  These bureaucrats can’t run ANYthing – remember?  Their renowned incompetence is so scary, we’ve been instructed to drag the whole thing into the bathtub and drown it.  These fools are the folks who will run health care so efficiently no private company could possibly be expected to compete?  Really?

It’s my recollection that we’ve spent the last 30 years privatizing as much government service delivery in every sector possible because it’s common knowledge that private industry always does it better – whatever “it” is.  Obama must be even more all-powerful than even previously suspected – he’s turned the entire public sector into an ominous threat to private industry!  Wow!  Poor health insurance companies!

I understand all the concern about a level playing field, really I do.  What's fair about government managers who don’t require first-class airline tickets, - or even private jets – and stay in run of the mill hotels?  Just because Federal laws prohibit the inclusion of golf club memberships and junkets to the Caymans on the taxpayer’s dime is no reason why private sector executives should have to suffer. 

WAH!

Come on, folks. Either government can offer up a cost-effective alternative for health care consumers (thereby threatening the for-profit model) or its bureaucratic wastefulness will prove that the private sector is the better option and raise the private insurance company back to the pedestal where it belongs.

How, exactly, does a Public Option not serve us?  It forces the industry to a non-profit standard (let us recall that much of health care was, actually, non-profit until recent decades) and insists that $1B (yes, that’s with a B) CEO compensation is not a cost of doing business that costs you and me.

I say Let The Government Waste Begin!