Now that Bernie is making a timely pitch for Medicare For All, I thought I'd put some emphasis on an aspect of the health care debate that few people are aware of.

Thanks to their always clever public relations efforts plus the millions of $$ they throw at members of Congress, most people do not realize that there is almost no difference between the health insurance companies and the Mafia when it comes to the role they play in the industries they lord over.

Most people just assume that the bosses of HC insurance companies are 'experts' in their field who have a special knowledge of the industry that no group of government bureaucrats in Washington could ever hope to match.

The actual truth is that the insurance companies who administer this nation's HC industry are not experts in the field of HC services. They simply hire the experts that are needed to make their HC services operation work.

Insurance people are finance people. Their only job is to figure out what to do with all of those $$ they receive in premiums that aren't needed to pay claims. They are no different from a bank in this respect. Their daily challenge, "How can I invest this money in a way that will make us insurance people even richer than we already are?"

In terms of their economic role in the provision of HC services to the American people, they are no different from the Mafia. They are simply middle-men who get themselves involved in the provision of a service that people are desperate to have and they walk away with a big cut of the proceeds just because they can (and have paid off enough politicians to make it all work out for them).

We don't need these Mafia-like middle-men in the middle of our HC services industry, milking us for every cent we've got, when government officials can hire experts just as easily as the Insurers can.

The big difference between government provided HC and HC provided by insurance companies is that you don't have the middle-man gobbling up profits off of other people's desperation. Eliminating that is going to reduce overall HC costs immediately. Add to that efficiencies of scale, the elimination of duplicated paperwork, the un-needed billing operation, etc. and you've got THE answer to [most of] America's HC [cost] crisis.

(Big Pharma's monopoly power is another matter altogether.)

For-profit insurance companies are NOT essential to the provision of quality HC services to the American people. They are, in economic terms, a pure waste. They are economic leeches who need to be excised from the HC industry and crushed underfoot. (If Justice means anything to ya...)

Maybe it would be a good idea for all of us who have been calling for single-payer to start casually---and constantly---referring to the Insurance companies as The Mafia, since it aptly describes their utterly un-needed and parasitic role in our HC industry.

I mean just start calling them The Mafia at any excuse. A term (metaphor, actually) which describes their role in HC perfectly, a deprecation that fully intends to insult its target.