On Dylan Rattigan - US can no longer afford the "rent" the insurers charge to access healthcare

[Phoebe Loosinhouse]

That was part of his discussion with a White House spokesperson. They were talking about the need for the White House to make the discussion in terms the average American could understand without excess wonkiness.

I really thought the "rent" terminology was quite interesting. We don't own our own healthcare, we just "rent" it from the insurers and they have finally made the rent too high for the country to afford.

Dylan also said he pays absolutely no attention to any Republicans whose only agenda is to derail healthcare without adding anything substantive to the conversation.

Pretty good stuff. A relief to see some people still discussing healthcare.

[ChairmanAgnostic]

1. not a bad way to look at it. But, how about "A tax on health care access?"

All insurers do is take your money, keep 40% of it, then do their best to deny coverage.

[dgibby]

2. Good analogy.

BTW, Ed Schultz discusses health care every night on his program.:hi:

[me b zola]

3. I've been impressed with the way that he's been covering health care

He straight out says that it is the health insurance industry & big pharma who are the big road blocks to health care reform and isn't afraid to talk about how much $$ they are spending on lobbying congress to get their way.

[Hippo_Tron]

4. Rent is actually a term commonly used in economics

And it doesn't have quite the same meaning as renting an apartment. Rent is basically the amount earned by a person/company in excess of the amount required to produce the good/service. This occurs when markets are not competitive and thus the person/company can charge in excess of the price that would be determined by supply and demand were the market competitive.

Insurance is not a competitive market and thus we are indeed paying economic rents to the insurance companies. One might also say that the insurance companies are engaged in "rent seeking" which means that they seek to increase their revenues by manipulating the markets to acquire more rent rather than seeking more revenues by providing more services.

[Phoebe Loosinhouse]

5. Interesting. Thanks. nt

[kenny blankenship]

6. Rent seeking behavior: see also Microsoft

from Wikipedia entry Rent Seeking
In economics, rent seeking occurs when an individual, organization or firm seeks to earn income by capturing economic rent through manipulation or exploitation of the economic environment, rather than by earning profits through economic transactions and the production of added wealth.

Rent seeking generally implies the extraction of uncompensated value from others without making any contribution to productivity, such as by gaining control of land and other pre-existing natural resources, or by imposing burdensome regulations or other government decisions that may affect consumers or businesses. While there may be few people in modern industrialized countries who do not gain something, directly or indirectly, through some form or another of rent seeking, rent seeking in the aggregate imposes substantial losses on society.

Most studies of rent seeking focus on efforts to capture special monopoly privileges, such as government regulation of free enterprise competition, though the term itself is derived from the far older and more established practice of appropriating a portion of production by gaining ownership or control of land.

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Whenever discussing the idea of an individual mandate to purchase insurance it is impossible to banish the specter of govt. enforced, govt. collected RENT for a class of specially privileged speculators, who as middlemen not performing any medical procedures nor inventing new drugs, are adding NO value whatsoever to the health care of the now literally captive market. Notice in the discussion of rent seeking behavior that the coercive power of government often plays a central role in the success of non-productive rent seeking schemes.