The trigger is on a gun pointed at the Democratic Party

[Kurt_and_Hunter]

Corporations are not human beings (despite their perverse legal status) and are no more capable of being good or evil than a shark. They are also as behaviorally simple as a shark and as incapable of self-regulation.

They exist only to maximize gains and/or minimize losses for shareholders. Asking more of them is folly and imagining more of them is idiocy. All corporate sponsorship of charitable activity, for instance, is meant to make a profit in the big picture and, if it is not, then management should be replaced.

Since corporations exist only for one specific purpose, however, they are blessedly easy to figure.

Any public option trigger offers private insurers three paths:

1. Sacrifice profit to forestall the trigger.
2. Carry on as usual and take whatever hit the trigger threatens.
3. Work/spend to get the legislation over-turned or softened and/or (re)gain the reins of enforcement.

Those three paths offer economic questions with economic answers. Private insurers will pursue whatever path (or mix of paths) offers the maximum return.

It is probably a lot cheaper to buy a Congress or Presidency than to sacrifice existing profits--or more precisely, cheap enough in risk/reward terms to be worth the effort. And the more sensitive the trigger and the harsher the triggered outcome becomes, the more cost-effective the third (political) path becomes. There’s no point buying (more of) the political system if the only downside is a wrist-slap but if compliance was truly burdensome, as I would hope it would be, then the insurers' only hope would be political change.

So the better (to my/our way of thinking) the trigger is, the more surely it will be a forced-response move. And all legislation is ammendable and replaceable by subsequent Congresses. The only way to cement a program is to get the people on board ASAP, in the way most folks today are onboard for Social Security and Medicare. There is a window of great vulnerability on a program's path from legislation to institution.

Not all the responses would be even MORE campaign contributions. That is only the tip of the iceberg. Much more would be spent on even MORE PR, TV ads, astro-turf, fake think tanks, phony beneficent projects... all the aparatus of the modern propoganda effort in brute survival mode for years on end. And their efforts will become even less policy-speciffic and more partisan. (Someone like Baucus is reliable to neuter proposed legislation but only the pugs could be counted on to gut an existing trigger program years down the road.) And since corporations have narrow but absolute interests they think locally and act globally... they want to hurt Democrats in any context. (Private healthcare types would do well to spend to block imigration reform that doesn't bear directly on their concerns, for instance, just to hurt Dems institutionally. That's how the game is played today, and to corner them without killing them just invites even more of the same, with greater ferocity.)



It would be cheaper and more efficient to simply have Congress appropriate money for the Republican Party and cut out the middle-man.

[Cant trust em]

1. "They are also as behaviorally simple as a shark and as incapable of self-regulation."

An apt description.

[AzDar]

2. K N R

:kick:

[Uncle Joe]

3. Good analogy and analysis.

Thanks for the thread, Kurt_and_Hunter.:thumbsup:

[Kurt_and_Hunter]

4. Another analogy: The trigger is like a James Bond villain explaining his plans...

Another analogy: The trigger is as fatuous as a James Bond villain explaining all his plans to a captive Bond rather than just dispatching him.

We need a Seth Green.

[Uncle Joe]

5. And there is even more depth to that analogy.

Can you imagine how much money the media corporation producing the James Bond series would have lost, if the first villain to capture him had just shot his ass and gotten it over with?