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| John Larson fulminating |
A Hartford Courant statehouse reporter, Daniela Altimari,
has had the intestinal fortitude to question Democrats in the U.S. Congressional
Delegation concerning an attack upon the insurance industry in Connecticut. The
title of her piece, “With
thousands of jobs at stake, Medicare for All is a complicated issue for
Democrats in Hartford, the ‘Insurance Capital of the World’“ is a bit
cumbersome, but it frames the issue perfectly.
First up at bat is Rep. John Larson, the congressman for
life in Connecticut’s 1st District, an impregnable Democrat fortress. Larson
says he does not believe that Medicare For All should eliminate the insurance
company product. And he is quoted in the piece: “Hey, Medicare for All, that’s
a laudable goal. It’s something people can wrap their arms around. But like
anything else, there’s a lot of detail that goes with that.” One of the details
that goes with that is the certain destruction of insurance as we know it in
Connecticut, once regarded as the insurance capital of the world.
“Larson,” Altimari remarks, “is among the Connecticut
Democrats who reject any health care overhaul that eliminates private insurance
companies from the marketplace. Millions of Americans get their insurance
through the private market, and, he said, ‘they’re very reluctant to give that
up.’”
Democrat presidential primary contestant U.S. Senator from Massachusetts
Elizabeth Warren is quoted on the obscene profits of a very competitive
insurance industry: “These insurance companies do not have a God-given right to
make $23 billion in profits and suck it out of our health care system. The
basic profit model of an insurance company is taking as much money as you can
in premiums and pay out as little as possible in health care coverage. That is
not working for Americans across this country.”
Larson was not asked whether he could name one company in
the United States, small or large, that was not similarly interested in turning
a profit. And Warren, a quasi-socialist foe of all "God-given" rights -- has not been asked by any of the numerous presidential
primary contestants sharing a stage with her whether her distaste for profits
might extend to all of the corporate contributors to her campaign, or whether
she is willing to extend her quasi-socialist principle – that a central
government should determine the profit line of a company – equitably to all businesses in the United States?
The most dramatic application of her principle may be seen
today in Venezuela, once the most prosperous of Latin American countries, now reduced
under the hammer blows of state planning to a smoking ruin. The ruination of
Venezuela began with the governmental seizure of the nation’s once profitable
oil industry under the withering hand of Hugo Chavez and his successor, former bus driver Nicholas
Maduro.
Of course, we know that a nationalized insurance industry
financed through tax dollars will quickly replace private industries doomed to compete
for product dollars.
Speaking for timid Connecticut insurance company CEOs, America’s
Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), a trade group, “submitted at a congressional hearing
this spring on Medicare for All,” according to Altimari, the following
position statement: “These proposals will mean higher taxes on all Americans,
higher total premiums and costs for the hundreds of millions of people enrolled
in private coverage, longer wait times, and lower quality of care. To put it
simply, patients would pay more to wait longer for worse care. ... We should
improve what we already have, rather than starting from scratch or moving in a
completely different direction.”
No believer in half measures, U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal is all in on the
total destruction in his state of an industry that uses part of its obscene
profits to employ “17,000 people directly and support another 31,000 indirectly, according to a recent study by the Connecticut Economic
Resource Center.”
Blumenthal is a co-sponsor of socialist Bernie Sanders’
plan. “He noted, in a recent interview," Altimari remarks, that the bill is
just one of several health care reforms he’s endorsed. “’My goal is
universal health insurance,’ Blumenthal said recently. ‘And that’s why I’ve
endorsed a variety of different solutions. Any one of them will be tremendous
progress toward that goal. I am not in favor of abolishing or eliminating
private insurance for its own sake (emphasis mine).’”
For whose sake, other than his own, is Blumenthal willing to
push forward a plan that would – everyone, even Sanders, is convinced – snuff out
the insurance industry both in Connecticut and in the nation at large?
Universal health care insurance would do to the nation's private insurance industry what the nationalization of the oil industry has done to the energy industry in Venezuela, and once nationalized under the Blumenthal/Sanders plan,
the rubblized insurance industry cannot be reconstituted. Once
shot at the socialist execution wall, the prisoner is dead forever.
Larson and other members of Connecticut’s all-Democrat U.S.
Congressional Delegation hope against hope that the much reduced insurance
industry in Connecticut – and its 48,000 impacted workers – will survive as boutique
industry providing a more expensive product to gold plated people who can
afford it.
“Our insurance industry” Larson says in the Altimari piece, “has
done a very good job of providing the wraparounds. They would sell the programs
that people with means and ability could purchase for expanded coverage.” Among the "people of means" who will likely be able to afford boutique coverage are legislators who are loathed to commit to the universal health care plans they fully intend to impose on everyone but themselves.
Good luck with that.
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