Advice from Krugman: "Don’t trust the insurance industry"

For whatever reason, the Obama administration seemed to ignore Paul Krugman when it came to saving the economy. Bad idea.

On health care, the President and his advisers need to listen to Krugman. Seriously. This is too important. Almost everyone in America who deals with an insurance company knows not to trust their insurance company. So, how is that so many people in positions of power are continually duped by them?

Members and staffers on the Hill need to read Krugman's's column today about the insurance industry -- and they all need to heed Krugman's advice:

Be warned, however. The insurance industry will do everything it can to avoid being held accountable.

At first the insurance lobby’s foot soldiers in Congress tried to shout down the public option with the old slogans: private enterprise good, government bad.

At this point, however, they’re trying to kill the public option in more subtle ways. The most recent ruse is the proposal for a “trigger” — the public option will only become available if private insurers fail to meet certain performance criteria. The idea, of course, is to choose those criteria to ensure that the trigger is never pulled.

And here’s the thing. Without an effective public option, the Obama health care reform will be simply a national version of the health care reform in Massachusetts: a system that is a lot better than nothing but has done little to address the fundamental problem of a fragmented system, and as a result has done little to control rising health care costs.

Right now the health insurers are promising to deliver major cost savings. But history shows that such promises can’t be trusted. As President Obama said in his letter, we need a serious, real public option to keep the insurance companies honest.

Once again, we're going to have to watch the Democrats on the Hill very, very closely. Many of them can't be trusted either. Some will sell us out to the insurance companies without a second thought.