Making the rounds to justify this crap-tastic bill are arguments regarding the importance of regulatory controls over insurance companies as a good enough reason to push the bill forward. Indeed, people point to Massachusetts and countries like Switzerland as their basis for why regulations can achieve the same thing as what market forces can obtain through the public option in conjunction with regulation.  I want to take on the regulatory reform arguments head on in this diary. One of the reasons I have become frustrated is that I know the ploys  behind the regulatory situation and how this allows for the image of reform, but in actually application you are merely changing the form of how bad faith actors perform their bad faith acts rather than preventing them from acting in bad faith.

There are several reasons the argument rings hollow to me: 1) The proposed reforms are wholly inadequate with regard to the task they being asked to perform due to loopholes; 2) The regulations are no where near the place they need to be to produce the price controls that you might find in Switzerland, and indeed, our most liberal example of this approach- MA- still has no price control involved; 3) Regulatory reform at the federal level has been wholly inadequate for decades with regard to addressing the abuses of bad faith actors; and finally 4) States like MA and countries like the Switzerland have a culture that allow for regulations to matter whereas DC does not (or "The Republicans will one day be in control so they will muck it up" argument).

There's more...