"In the area that they operate, they do NOT contribute to innovation." Oh, come off it! Who are you trying to fool?
Insurance is the most regulated of businesses. You can't innovate too well when your products, prices, performance, and marketing all have to be coordinated to pass muster among the regulators in fifty separate states--not to mention all the "assistance" the Federal government provides. I would love some innovation which would allow me to eliminate coverage for a lot of the quackery and frippery in modern medicine, but my insurance company cannot provide such innovation. It is illegal. What must be covered is prescribed by state law, so I have to pay for your chiropractic back rubs, herbal "treatments", colonoscopies, and a lot of other stuff I would be glad to do without.
Companies in highly regulated industries are never good at innovation. They are good at dealing with regulators, which is the only thing that makes them successful in their corporate lives. That has been true, at many times, of insurance, banking, railroading, air travel, and utilities, to name a few; and it is certainly true of insurance today.
You people hell-bent on foisting government health care on everyone ought just to drop all your pretenses and disingenuous arguments and state plainly that public health care is your goal, derived solely from your political ideology and your aversion to any adverse consequences resulting from any possible bad decisions you might make if left to your own devices.
If people from the U. S. ever start traveling to Canada in large numbers to receive that excellent socialized health care up there--the kind you are always extolling--then I'll listen to you a little more closely. Until then, it's just political posturing and the desire the force everyone else to conform to your idea of the "public good".
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