Because there are private bureaucrats, too.

I read today that in the past decade the insurance companies have made a profit of 428%.  Is it me or does the industry’s woe is me routine seem a bit … I dunno, disingenuous? It sent me looking for a current Noam Chomsky talk on healthcare since I had posted one during the election season.

Chomsky contends that the American public has supported a modern healthcare system for decades but the business world has always been against it.  The recent years’ explosion of healthcare costs for manufacturing companies (see the car industry) has caused this industry to support a some sort of single-payer government healthcare plan.  In other words, when the people want it, meh.  When industry wants it… well that’s another matter.

My favorite part starts at the 6.25 mark where he talks about how the health industry’s complaints that the public plan will drive them out of business might as well be an admission that they are so inefficient that the government will do it better than they will.  I do not understand how the nationalized health care opponents can say the government doesn’t know what they are doing yet the healthcare industry says that it can not compete with the government.  Seems paradoxical.

~Forth