Private Health Insurance and Private Fire Brigades: Two Dinosaurs
Tina Dupuy of Huffington Post has an article making an analogy between private health insurance and the private, for-profit fire companies of yore. I made a similar argument in The Activist a couple of months ago:
Once upon a time, before government-run fire departments, private fire brigades would put out fires in those buildings covered by fire insurance companies. This policy of selective, for-profit firefighting was inefficient, inegalitarian and unsafe for dense urban communities, nevertheless it was profitable for the fire companies of the 19th century, whose owners were probably quite happy with the system as it was.
The analogies to health care are obvious; the for-profit health insurance model is inefficient, prohibitively costly for those most at risk, and epidemiologically unsafe for the public at large. Some people make big money in this unhappy arrangement. Those people, the major insurance companies and their lobbies, are not potential allies because their interests are antithetical to meaningful reform. They cannot be “brought to the table” because any real solution to the health care problem would necessarily involve their demise, like the for-profit private fire companies of yesteryear.
