The Simple Alternative to "Health Care Reform"

There are a couple of very simple and relatively inexpensive things that can be done to help us all out here:

1) Federal government allows insurance companies to compete across state lines.
2) States stop mandating what insurance policies in the states "must" cover. I don't smoke, I'm not a drunkard, nor am I a crackwhore. Why do I have to pay for smoke/alcohol/crackwhore rehab coverage on my insurance policy? Because the state says so...
3) Federal government allows catastrophic/high deductible plans and Health Savings Accounts (HSAs) to continue existing. They are great investments for young, healthy people with average incomes.

Let the insurance companies carry policies across state lines to get more healthy, low-risk people on their rosters, spread the risk, and lower costs logically, safely, and for a LOT less money that what the federal government is wanting to do. Conversely, allowing policies to carry over state lines will also allow them to create larger pools of riskier, unhealthy people, which will succeed in spreading the risk and lowering the cost for them as well. It's a win-win, and more importantly it doesn't cost $1 trillion to implement, it just costs the politicians giving up some of their centralized power... but we can't have that!

In a market that already has thirteen hundred (1,300) participants, it's foolhardy (read: stupid) to believe that ONE (1) more insurance provider will have this dramatic effect of lowering costs and leveling the playing field.

All of you out there who pay out the ass for private insurance are doing so not because the private system as we know it is broken, it's actually working exactly how it's supposed to. It's because you are paying the costs rolled over to private insurers by providers who are not getting paid enough by the existing public option, which already controls nearly 50% of the health care market. Creating a public option that charges artificially low rates and brings more and more people into the public system will only succeed in costs being rolled over to private insurers more and more, causing the premiums we pay for private plans to sky rocket until it is literally unaffordable for any one except for the richest Americans. Meanwhile, the rest of us "average folk" are hung out to dry with an inefficient system plagued by lower quality care and supply shortages.

Happy voting.... unfortunately the decision about the future of our health care has already been made, and is at this point irreversible. We made the health care decision in November 2008. Prepare for private policy costs to continue to increase. Prepare to be forced on to the government plantation, whether you like it or not.