“In the health care debate, Democrats and their allies have gone after insurance companies as rapacious profiteers making ‘immoral’ and ‘obscene’ returns while ‘the bodies pile up.’
“Ledgers tell a different reality. Health insurance profit margins typically run about 6 percent, give or take a point or two. That’s anemic compared with other forms of insurance and a broad array of industries.
“Profits barely exceeded 2 percent of revenues in the latest annual measure…”
Now, the “Democrats and their allies” know darned well what the truth is. But they have some legislation they want passed, and they’ll do whatever they have to do to get it done. Let me remind you again of some of the Rules for Radicals I shared in my last post:
“An organizer…does not have a fixed truth – truth to him is relative and changing; everything to him is relative and changing. He is a political relativist.”
“The man of action views the issue of means and ends in pragmatic and strategic terms…He asks of ends only whether they are achievable and worth the cost; of means, only whether they will work.”
“Before men can act an issue must be polarized. Men will act when they are convinced that their cause is 100 per cent on the side of the angels and that the opposition is 100 per cent on the side of the devil. [The organizer] knows that there can be no action until issues are polarized to this degree.”
So, in this case, the issue at hand is that Democrats want to ultimately replace private health insurance with a government-run system. And that is the ultimate aim, no matter what they may say. Many leading Democrats are on record as favoring a “single-payer” (i.e., the government) system. Obama is on record as favoring a single-payer system. But the American people don’t want a single-payer system, because we’ve seen the dark side of such systems in other countries such as Canada and the U.K., and we’ve seen what a fiscal nightmare Medicare and Medicaid have become. So, in order to turn public opinion around, they are trying to "polarize" the issue by demonizing the health insurance industry. It doesn’t matter if they have to lie to make that happen, because truth is “relative and changing,” and all that matters is whether the effort will work.
They apparently believe that we’re too stupid to understand what they’re doing and why they’re doing it. In fact, Nancy Pelosi has such contempt for our intellect that she said yesterday that a government-sponsored “public option” may be more attractive if they just call it something else. So you’re starting to hear it called “the consumer option,” and the “competitive option.” Harry Reid thinks that it will fly as long as the states have the ability to “opt out” of the public plan. Mind you, that doesn’t mean that the people in those states could also “opt out” of paying for the plan – just that they wouldn’t receive any of the stuff they were paying for. Knowing what we know about politicians, does anybody out there seriously believe that any state would go down that road? Anybody? You there in the back? No? Too bad, because if you're buying that, I've got some beachfront property in West Texas I'd like to sell you. (It's great beach - a long ways to the water, but great beach.)
I believe that the American people are not that stupid, and that a day of electoral reckoning is coming. There’s a reason why the Congressional approval rating is lower than whale feces, and this kind of stuff is part of it.
In closing, I’d just like to thank Mr. Woodward for being intellectually honest enough to report the truth. That doesn’t happen nearly often enough these days, which is one of the reasons why people’s trust in traditional media is also lower than whale feces. Unfortunately, reporting the truth about something like this can’t be good for Mr. Woodward’s career. We just hope things work out OK for him. If worst comes to worst, maybe he can find a gig on Fox News.
Thanks for listening.
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