Hypocrisy is once again on display in the United States Senate. Creating competition in the health insurance industry is the one goal that Congressional Democrats and Republicans can say they agree upon, even if they disagree about how to bring about this competition.

Senators have been scrambling to create new and ever-more complicated systems - public insurance option, and cooperative exchanges - that only theoretically would infuse the health insurance markets with more competition.

But the truth is that we can lower insurance rates immediately by repealing the McCarran-Ferguson Act of 1952, which has allowed insurance companies to operate outside the federal antitrust laws for the past 57 years. So far, the Senate has been unwilling to end the insurance industry's baseless exemption from the antitrust laws.

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cross-posted from Calitics, the progressive community blog for California, also at dKos

I was also on the call that Chris mentioned in Breaking Blue, and like always, I was impressed with Sen. Reid. However, I'll leave that to the national bloggers.  I highly recommend Bob Geiger for coverage of all things Senate.

I, however, wanted to address Arnold Schwarzenegger's health care plan.  This is relevant primarily because Schwarzenegger plans on asking for $3.7 billion in new federal funds for the plan.  So, I asked the majority leader, what he thinks of California's plan, if the Governor will get his money, and where we should go from here.

Unfortunately, I'm not a great transcriber, but he is certainly up on the issues.  However, he pointed out something that I also addressed in my post entitled "Health Insurance Sucks", namely that the insurance industry, well, sucks:

The problem is that the insurance industry is the enemy of most everything we do today.  They have an anti-trust exemption from the Depression era that was supposed to last only a few years (the McCarran-Ferguson Act) but is still with us today.  This exemption allows the industry to do harmful things to the country. They are fixing prices, which would ordinarily be a violation of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, but there is nothing we can do. 

More over the flip...

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