Inducing a Market Crash

Heather MacDonald's Post-Christmas economic vent:

Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders recently encapsulated one fallacy regarding for-profit activity prevalent among intellectual elites: “The point of insurance companies is not to provide health care but to make a profit,” he said, as if these were mutually exclusive goals. Sanders complained that for-profit insurance companies are too bureaucratic and, in a flight of fancy that would have seemed like a fringe conceit just a year ago, asserted that they require government to provide efficiency-inducing competition. The hilarious idea that government is less bureaucratic and more efficient than private sector companies will endure even if the seemingly nine-lived public option finally stays dead.

Insurance companies are profit seeking because they have a fiduciary responsibility to be profitable. Our legal tradition, of which Bernie Sanders (Socialist-VT) is a part in his capacity as a Senator, requires insurance companies to seek profits. Bernie can vote to change that if he likes. If he 59 other senators do vote that way, I expect we'll see a lot more short interest in insurance companies.

As for the absurd idea that government is less bureaucratic and more efficient than private companies: Medicare denies more claims than any private insurer.