Bad is the Best They Can Do

This op-ed in today's Washington Post illustrates why real health-care reform requires moving away from private insurance towards a single-payer system. That was probably not the authors' intention, since they are the CEO and Chief Medical Officer at Aetna.

"The alternative to curbing costly waste is further growth in the uninsured population," they conclude. In other words, to cover more of the uninsured, private insurance companies needs to cut back on the amount of coverage they offer. Full coverage or good coverage — you can't have both, apparently.

That's an astonishing admission of failure, a straightforward acknowledgment that our insurance industry is unable to guarantee a level of health care that every other major industrialized country has managed to provide for it's citizens (at half the cost). Sorry, Aetna, but the insurance industry had its chance and it failed. Time to try something else.