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Back in June, 2008, when George Bush was still president, Barack Obama was nothing but a junior in-the-minority-party Senator from Illinois who thought he could get away with challenging Hillary Clinton for the nomination, Denise Grady of The New York Times wrote

When the Golden Rule Insurance Company rejected her application for health coverage last year, Peggy Robertson was mystified.

“It made no sense,” said Ms. Robertson, 39, who lives in Centennial, Colo. “I’m in perfect health.”

She was turned down because she had given birth by Caesarean section. Having the operation once increases the odds that it will be performed again, and if she became pregnant and needed another Caesarean, Golden Rule did not want to pay for it. A letter from the company explained that if she had been sterilized after the Caesarean, or if she were over 40 and had given birth two or more years before applying, she might have qualified.

Read the article here.

I admit the impression I got when I read the write-up at DailyKos was that this had all happened just a day or two ago and just around the corner. But just a little bit of Googling demonstrated it’s not actually topical at all…

...or wouldn’t be if…

...it wasn’t a perfect snapshot of the kind of jackass crap that drove the initiative for healthcare reform in the first place!

And why didn’t we hear howls from various and assorted right-wing psycho teabaggers, tenthers, and deathers with travel and sign-making expense accounts from Fox “News?” Well, you could say it was because Golden Rule is a private corporation and therefore more Infallable in Every Decision than the pope. But it could also be because Golden Rule’s founder was a major right-wing moneybags. But I digress.

The fact of the matter is that (going perhaps against common progressive wisdom) the environment private insurance operates into is aggressively stacked against it — yeah, they make money… and for that matter yeah, they can only make money by fucking sick people over — and it’s bull-whiz like telling healthy women they have to get sterilized before they can get insurance is a perfect example of why they’re not up to the task.

Golden Rule, a relatively small insurer (however pretentious its erstwhile pretentions of grandeur might have been) didn’t have the clout to negotiate efficiently with major medical centers that provide things like, oh, say, birthing centers and obstetrics surgeries. So they did what by the “logic” of the marketplace made the second-most sense: they refused to insure someone with FHPS (fecund healthy person syndrome.)

The idea behind healthcare reform, even the really watered-down versions, is in classic (Teddy) Roosevelt style, to create big enough markets for medical services to rebalance the market clout of service providers.

The reason people keep talking about a public option (and why, by the way, we need one) is that insurance-industry assholes like the little pencil-pecker at Golden Rule who cooked up the get-sterilized-first exception are still there pecking away with their pencils. A public option will help keep them in check as well. Not so much by increasing their profitability as giving people an alternative when their private insurer of choice starts making out-of-control demands.

But seriously? Get a caesarian before you get Healthcare? That might have been fine for George Bush and what was left of his party in 2008. But this is America and that kind of crap… from a pro-life private company, by the way, was and is intolerable.