Zaniya, Romney, Clinton -- All Corporate Socialists!

Don't believe me that Zaniya Project Draft Recommendation #14 -- government mandate for individuals to buy private health insurance, like what Romney did in Massachusetts and HR Clinton now proposes -- is just a sop to the insurance industry? Fine. Read Doug Wiken at Dakota Today, who refers us to an excellent Marketplace commentary from Jamie Court, president of the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights. Says Court [emphasis mine]:

...Mandatory private health insurance proposals are all stick and no carrot.

The average health insurance premium for a family of four is just over 12 grand per year. What middle-class family making, say, 60,000 bucks per year can afford that bill?

What we need is the carrot of affordable health care. That means government standardizing charges by insurers, doctors, hospitals and drug companies. No more $6 Tylenol in the hospital.

The reason health insurance is so unaffordable today is that no one is watching the costs. With standardization, insurance would be cheaper and people would want to buy it -- not have to because the government is threatening them with a tax penalty.

Oh wait, I can hear the plaintive cry of the free market. You can't tell a doctor, insurer, hospital or drug company what's reasonable to charge. That's socialism. Well, how reasonable then is it to tell every American you have to buy a product whose cost is obscene if you want to be a U.S. citizen? Isn't that corporate socialism?

Mandatory health insurance is a government bailout of a free market that's failed its customers. Fewer people and employers are buying private health insurance because it costs so much more and delivers so little.

Adds wise old Wiken:

We will be barraged with a bunch of smoke and mirrors designed to give the appearance of making health care affordable, but which will actually make huge salaries of insurance and health care administrators even more lucrative and will continue to suck the life out of the economy and stifle new business startups. And as the commentary above indicated make it possible for ever larger political contributions to politicians so they can spread more smoke and mirrors when their previous proposals fail to deliver anything significant.

Time to say goodbye to a private health insurance system that has failed and hello to a single-payer system that is efficient.

While I'm thinking of it, Boston Globe columnist Derrick Z. Jackson helps us follow the money [again, emphasis mine -- nothing like political shysterism to make me feel emphatic]:

The hold of the healthcare industry on the top candidates is already apparent. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, the top recipient of campaign contributions so far from the pharmaceutical and health products industry is Republican Mitt Romney ($228,260). But the next two are Democrats Barack Obama ($161,124) and Hillary Clinton ($146,000). The top recipient of contributions from health professionals is Clinton ($990,611). Romney is second at $806,837, and Obama third at $748,637.

The top recipient of cash from the insurance industry, which includes health insurers, is another Democrat, Connecticut's Christopher Dodd, at $605,950. Romney and Republican Rudolph Giuliani are second and third, with Clinton and Obama fourth and fifth. Even though Obama is in fifth place, he still has collected $269,750 from insurance companies.

In a category that is relatively small in money thus far, but huge in terms of healthcare morality, Democratic presidential candidates occupy four of the top six spots in receiving money from death-dealing tobacco companies. After Giuliani's $69,500 from tobacco companies, Dodd has received $45,400, Clinton $32,300, Romney $31,400, Obama $7,885, and Democrat Joe Biden, $4,000. [Derrick Z. Jackson, "Kucinich Is Right on Healthcare," Boston Globe, 2007.08.29.]

The Zaniya Project has 12 days to edit Recommendation #14 out of its final report. Let's hope they hear some complaints and come up with a plan that serves everyone, not just the rich insurance guys. If you're going to be socialist, Zaniya Task Force, you might as well go whole hog and help everyone, not engage in this charade of protecting the failing free market.