The issue is payment, not insurance.

http://www.counterpunch.org/mokhiber09182009.html

S. 618 never left the Senate Judiciary Committee. There were 9 republicans and 10 democrats. The insurance industry opposed S.618 and paid the republicans a total of $816,120 to defeat it.

what else is new indeed

http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=s110-618

As for the anti-trust bit, I believe republicans have been pushing to get rid of all that and allow insurance companies to compete across state lines for some time now.

is that supposed to make some kind of sense?

Insurers' Anti-Trust Exemption
By dday Friday Sep 18, 2009 10:00am John Conyers and some allies on the House Judiciary Committee have come up with a fabulous way to get the insurance industry in line – by threatening to remove their anti-trust exemption.

Many people don't know that the insurance industry, under the McCarran-Ferguson Act of 1945, has a broad anti-trust exemption that facilitates regional monopolies. The Act allows states to regulate the insurance business instead of the federal government, but also allows that, as long as the state regulates the industry, federal anti-trust laws would not apply.

As a result of this exemption, states have seen markets for health insurance where one or two companies predominate. In the state of Maine, Wellpoint controls 71% of the market. In North Dakota, Blue Cross controls 90%. Using the Herfindahl/Hirschman Index, a metric for market concentration, a 2007 study by the AMA found almost every health insurance market in the United States is highly concentrated.

http://baby.families.com/blog/why-the-us-infant-mortality-rate-is-so-high

"It is worth noting, in respect of the infant mortality numbers just cited, that the WHO annual report also tracks the percentage of births attended by skilled health personnel. While the number for attended U.S. births is high, at 99%, there are 46 countries that have 100% of births attended."

The author and ObamaCare lemmings will say we're doing worse than 46 countries in regard to this statistic. But do you truly believe every birth in 46 countries is attended by a physician? Every single one, in 46 different countries?

Or is it far more likely that those are simply the only births that get reported by those countries? They probably have a centralized system that reports to the WHO, but doesn't count the babies born at home because they never see those babies, who probably die at a higher rate. If these countries are not reporting all births, it also props up their infant mortality rates and life expectancy rates. And the WHO doesn't care, because they'd like to see large centralized government healthcare systems everywhere. It's all bogus.

And it was the GOVERNMENT who screwed up the banking industry, for politicial reasons. Nobody else. I should know, I was in the banking industry for decades. I witnessed it all firsthand. Of course, you are free to believe everything that lying sack of crap Keith Olbermoron says. It's a free country. We are allowed to listen to idiots.

Oil market? AIG-like insurance market? Banksters?

Yeah, the market "worked" alright.

http://www.counterpunch.org/green09162009.html

Real national insurance competition, tort reform, more flexibility in insurance coverage (catastrophic only coverage), a windfall profits tax on insurance companies that exploit consumers, computerized medical records, elimination of Medicare fraud…these are a few ways to bring costs down without the government taking over (public option). We manage to make the market work in almost every other area of this country. There's no reason it can't work for health insurance. The problem is, we don't have free market health care in this country. When we did have it, medical costs were much lower.

how's that?

from free marketeer King…."We can make many reforms to bend down the cost curve of the health insurance companies." Yes, it's called a public option

King sez….."We can make many reforms to bend down the cost curve of the health insurance companies. " I'm all ears

http://www.counterpunch.org/ginsburg09112009.html

Why would we want to hand health insurance off to the federal government, when the federal government is already $12 trillion in debt (soon to be over $20 trillion in debt) ? Why would we want to add another enormous liability on top of the federal government's already enormous unsustainable liabilities ? There has to be a better way.

http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts09142009.html