The USA is already the biggest health insurance company--and the private insurance companies still thrive!

To all those friends of the Health insurance industry in the U.S. Senate: government competition is no obstacle to massive insurance company profits.

One half of the US's health care industry is funded by a non-profit health insurance system: it's called the US government. We already have a massive "public" option and we still have a massively profitable private health insurance industry.

All the Democrats are seeking is a public "option" to insure the remaining 10% of Americans who don't have health insurance. This would mean the now-uninsured would have "preventive" care, and preventing illness is a lot less costly than the taxpayers having to pay to treat a full-blown illness. Either way, the uninsured are going to a government/taxpayer funded clinic or hospital once they get sick. Our tax dollars will pay for treatment no matter what. The public option is the only way that the total cost for care will be brought down. The private health insurers have never reduced their rates and have no incentive. Republicans always talk about saving the taxpayer's money. Whether the tax is paid to the government or to a private health insurance corporation, we all pay the cost of the massive profiteering by the health industry. Based on the way the Republican's bankrupted both our government and banks and Wall Street over the last 8 years, why does anyone see them as protectors of our money? I trust my government, which I can vote for or against, a lot more than unelected corporate monopolies.

---Rex Frankel
--------------------

2/4/2010--WASHINGTON (AP) -- Government is poised to become king of the hill in America's vast health care system, with or without President Barack Obama's planned redo, according to an economic report released Thursday. Federal and state programs will pay slightly more than half the tab for health care purchased in the United States by 2012, says the analysis by Medicare number crunchers published in the journal Health Affairs. That's even if Obama's health care overhaul wastes away in congressional limbo...

...The report estimated that in 2009, the United States spent $2.5 trillion for health care, with government programs - mainly Medicare and Medicaid - paying $1.2 trillion. Employer health insurance and various private sources covered the other $1.3 trillion. Even as the economy shrank because of the downturn, health care spending grew by 5.7 percent from 2008. Spending by government grew nearly three times faster than private spending, closing in to overtake it...

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_HEALTH_CARE_GOVERNMENT_ROLE?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2010-02-04-00-49-37