Broken promise; insurance company profits

I do have to say, one thing that has disappointed me about this road to healthcare reform is that President Obama didn't follow through on a certain campaign promise. (To be honest, I'd forgotten about it until a Republican senator spoke about it in a speech.)

Senator Obama promised the following:

"That's what I will do in bringing all parties together, not negotiating behind closed doors, but bringing all parties together, and broadcasting those negotiations on C-SPAN so that the American people can see what the choices are, because part of what we have to do is enlist the American people in this process," Obama said at a debate in Los Angeles on Jan. 31, 2008.

AT THE SAME TIME, I've been watching some of the Senate speeches today before the Senate votes on healthcare reform. And I listened to Howard Dean on "Meet the Press" this morning. There's so much posturing and outright lies in some of these speeches.

There's also talk about how the current bill must be flawed since insurance company stock prices are up. I'm not a fan of these companies, and I believe fundamental healthcare reform will involve far more radical changes to the system that we have. But think of this example: if the government decided to pay for three meals a day for every homeless person in the U.S., the future revenues (and the profits) of food producers would rise, would they not? And when profits for a company are expected to rise, the market normally values the company with a higher stock price.

The Senate bill is adding 30 million people to the pool of people with health insurance. It uses private insurance plans, for the most part, to achieve that. So clearly insurance companies will have higher revenues, and most likely, higher profits. It's simplistic, however, to claim that if insurance companies are benefiting from the bill that Americans are not. Just as the homeless would benefit from those three meals a day--and food producers would benefit from a larger market--the uninsured will still benefit even if insurance companies profits rise. (Ezra Klein addresses the issue of insurance company profitability here.)

Healthcare reform is just beginning. There's a lot of work to be done if we're truly going to move to a system that gives people access to healthcare without bankrupting the country and its citizens. I just hope that we have the collective will to make those changes. The difficulty in getting to the point where we are today doesn't make me very optimistic.