Jan Schakowsky Gets Her Wish
31st October 2013
The big insurance companies themselves are doing fine–they just jack up their rates to cover all the new patients and benefits, passing the costs along to their customers, who no longer have a choice but to buy (and to taxpayers, who will foot the bill for new subsidies). It’s the consumers’ side of the industry that has been gutted. We cannot choose a product we like the most, but must bear one we hate the least.
When “progressives” think about “industry,” they conjure images of fat, greedy barons; groaning, suffering workers; and and dirty, polluting smokestacks. They never think of the consumers who are made happier by what industry produces. They view selling a product to a customer who needs or wants it as a form of “abuse,” which is how Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) described the individual insurance market on Wednesday.
At bottom, they have contempt for consumers, because they cannot imagine that any purchase really happens of the customer’s own free will. They refuse to accept that a family might feel happier if it can buy bare-bones insurance that allows it to pay other bills, rather than bells-and-whistles insurance that forces it to make lifestyle changes, to go into debt or to become dependent on state assistance programs like Medicaid.