He has a point, people who don’t understand an industry should not be regulating it.

“Well, we’re all different,” Sessions explained. “Why should a smoker pay more?” he said before interrupted.

While he is getting blasted for this by the Democrats, its not to say it’s not a fair comparison. If someone costs more to insure, they pay higher premiums. That’s the way the game works. It doesn’t matter why they cost more. It could be because of their gender, because they are overweight, because certain diseases are in their family history, etc. etc. A healthy woman potentially costs more to insure than a healthy man. Either the insurance companies raise everyone’s premiums, or they raise the premiums of half of their clients. As a business, you anger fewer people if you do the latter.

“The NRCC and extreme right wing of the Republican Party are totally out of step with women,” said Jennifer Crider, spokeswoman for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

How about higher premiums for young males for car insurance? It seems that Jennifer Crider is out of step with men and only concerned with members of her own gender. There has been a lot of outrage about Women paying higher premiums than men. But theres been none for young male drivers.  Women are also more likely to seek medical care than men. This fact makes them more expensive to insure. That is how the industry works.

His statements do have a factual basis though, its just somewhat ironic that he is representing the most unemployed state in the Union. By raising taxes on those who are employed to give health care to those who don’t have jobs, you are costing an employed person more money for something that is out of their control If you’re a person with a job, this bill is bad for you. You will have to pay more money for the same service, and the service will be worse because of the massive number of horrendously poor-health people that are going to be injected into the risk pool.

Apparently the Democrats were in such a hurry to pass healthcare reform, they forgot to actually change anything. All they did was make it illegal to self insure. Dennis Kucinich released a statement on his website today

“Clearly, the insurance companies are the problem, not the solution.  They are driving up the cost of health care.  Because their massive bureaucracy avoids paying bills so effectively, they force hospitals and doctors to hire their own bureaucracy to fight the insurance companies to avoid getting stuck with an unfair share of the bills.  The result is that since 1970, the number of physicians has increased by less than 200% while the number of administrators has increased by 3000%.  It is no wonder that 31 cents of every health care dollar goes to administrative costs, not toward providing care.  Even those with insurance are at risk. The single biggest cause of bankruptcies in the U.S. is health insurance policies that do not cover you when you get sick.

Well surely his party would be doing something to address this. After all, they passed healthcare reform didn’t they?

“But instead of working toward the elimination of for-profit insurance, H.R. 3962 would put the government in the role of accelerating the privatization of health care.  In H.R. 3962, the government is requiring at least 21 million Americans to buy private health insurance from the very industry that causes costs to be so high, which will result in at least $70 billion in new annual revenue, much of which is coming from taxpayers.  This inevitably will lead to even more costs, more subsidies, and higher profits for insurance companies — a bailout under a blue cross.

While I personally think the solution is in the private market, not in the government’s hands. Congress disagrees, but they don’t seem to be doing any sort of actual reform with the bill.  This bill simply feeds the problem. The problem that exists with the insurance industries constant search for a reason to deny your legitimate claim.  Wouldn’t it be better if they had passed a bill that required all health insurers to charge the full amount of expected future health expenses in their premiums and that all those future expenses are guaranteed to be covered and that health insurance companies had to offer insurance to everyone, even if at a greater cost for higher risk individuals? It would greatly lessen the risk of bankruptcy associated with catastrophic illness. That is reform.

A lot of people wanted the full bill to pass, but they forgot that this is what they were inevitably doomed to receive because the ones who they voted for convinced them to vote for them on the dime of health insurance companies. The silver lining of this bill is that we don’t have to worry that those insurance companies may have to lay off their employees.