Let’s take a quick step back here.  Does anyone here think that the insurance industry—medical insurance in particular—doesn’t really provide any real service other than to spread the cost of bad things across their subscriber base.  Yes?  Ok, well this is a fairly socialist concept to begin with (people paying for other’s expenses), but we’ll leave that for now.  Moving on, insurance companies make their money in two ways: 1) denying coverage to as many of their customers as possible (people who should probably get it); and 2) padding their premiums by as much as they can.  Does anyone think that either of these two ways are an honest way of making a profit, let alone risky enough—they take any risk out by having a sufficiently large coverage base—to be considered an investment and deserve a payoff (not that I really support the investment paradigm, but this is a capitalist nation).  No?  Ok, so we have an industry that isn’t taking really providing a value addition and is making it’s money by being as dishonest as possible. On top of that, insurance in general is an industry that takes advantage of peoples’ fears and that just kind of angers me.

This begs the question, if there were a part of a reform legislation that an exceedingly corrupt industry was really strongly against because it provides a competing service that wouldn’t have the same incentive to be corrupt like the rest of industry…

Am I missing something?