One of the strangest things to come out of the health care debate was the the Price Waterhouse report. At one time Price Waterhouse had a good reputation but after the report on the Baucus bill where at the direction of the insurance they produced a report thin on facts and fat on scare tactics, Price Waterhouse is little more than an appendage of the industries they claim to audit.
This incident sheds some light on many of the financial dissasters of the last few years as clearly firms like Price Waterhouse did not really audit firms they simply passed on whatever gibberish the “client” told them too. Hopefully the next area of reform will be to replace “independant” auditors with a government agency that really does audit the books of comppanies.
Update: This explains the insurance industry pretty well
It’s true, as the report says, that buying better insurance will cost somewhat more than buying insurance that doesn’t cover anything. The vast majority of the people affected by this will be using subsidies, of course, but put that aside for a moment. This is part of the point of health-care reform: Insurers will no longer have the freedom to offer products that let an individual think his family his protected when the policy will do nothing of the sort. That may raise prices, in much the way that antibiotics cost more than herbal supplements, but it raises prices because it reduces the insurance industry’s ability to sell a deceptive and insufficient product.
Although I would add that buying better insurance is only going to be more expensive if no other cost saving measures are added and insurance company profits stay in the twent-percent range.