Excerpt:

George Lakoff, author of Don’t Think of an Elephant, wrote a piece for Salon about SCHIP called Don’t Think of a Sick Child that I just read. Lakoff makes an important point about health insurance.

Health insurance companies make their money by denying care. They maximize profit by authorizing as little care as they can get away with. That’s what all those administrative costs — as high as 30 percent — and all that paperwork are mostly about. It takes a lot of people to justify denying care.

It’s the opposite of the way the market is supposed to work: Make more money by delivering more product. The health insurance industry makes more money by delivering less product. It maximizes profits by minimizing care.

Profit-run medicine is not, and cannot be, full care. What is needed is patient- and doctor-run medicine. The State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) is just that. Our children need care. Our doctors provide it. The government handles the transactions, period. And we pay a lot less and get a lot more, because there are virtually no administrative costs and no profits being taken by outsiders.

Profit-maximizing insurance, as opposed to doctor-provided care, forces the nation to choose among its children: who will get care and who won’t, who will suffer and who won’t, who will live and who will die.

Lakoff then explains why need programs like SCHIP…

Government in America has a sacred moral mission to protect us, its citizens. Protection means more than the military and the police. It means worker protection, consumer protection, environmental protection and Social Security. And it means health security.

President Bush warns us against “government-run” healthcare, which is anything but government run. In SCHIP, the government doesn’t deliver care, it enables it. It directs payments. Bush wants to leave the nation’s children — and the rest of us — to the mercy of profit-run healthcare. The reason we need SCHIP is that profit-run healthcare has failed.

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