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osewalrus,
2007-12-18:
Bluntly, this is what sank Hilary Clinton's healthcare plan in '93. She and Ira Magaziner spent endless hours negotiating with the insurance industry and the drug industry to try to come up with a plan sufficiently palatable to get buy in. The result: a plan no one liked and the drug companies killed.
This is also why the tech companies get spanked on a regular basis. They are always looking to cut a deal with the intellectual property mafia. But the IP mafia never cut deals. And if they pretend to do so (such as the Digital Millenium Copyright Act), they will come back again and reopen them before the ink is dry.
Drug companies and others who profit off the current health care mess will fight tooth and nail against any change contrary to their interests. The formulation of public policy must take this into account, and must distinguish real problems of implementation and sustainability from industry posturing. As I often explain in my day job, I am not interested in solutions that won't work because they are a waste of time and do more harm than good. But I don't "negotiate" with broadcasters for use of the broadcast white spaces -- I fight them. I don't "bring everyone to the table" to address network neutrality -- I put out my vision, evidence and arguments and expect the industry to put out theirs.
The next President is going to have to fight against corporate interests to change the status quo. Of course the drug companies will have influence -- this is a democracy and the "right to petition government for redress of grievances" (lobbying) is guaranteed even to artificial persons by our Constitution. But if the next President goes in thinking s/he can "negotiate" with industry and "cut a deal" that has "broad stakeholder support," then s/he is either hopelessly naive or selling soothing syrup.
Future Health-they-don't-care Programming
(no subject)
I've worked for a number of different industries, and for lobbyists representing big industries. This much is true: that whatever laws and regulations are passed, whatever new policies and approaches are enacted, private industry will find ways to deal with the results. They will fight change that impacts their bottom line tooth and nail, but once that change is enacted, they will be very quick to adapt their business methods accordingly. People in search of profit can be amazingly resourceful.
But when corporate profit is at stake, regulation and oversight is essential, because when it comes down to profits versus people, profits will win every time. So the system must be set up to reward the right kind of corporate behavior and punish the other kind, in terms of its effect on profits. Make it more profitable to be green, or at the very least much more expensive to NOT be green, and corporations will go green.
Unfortunately, the health insurance industry is a parasite -- its business model is to take in premiums from people in promise for a future service, which it then does all it can to ultimately not deliver. The entire idea is to take in money and NOT pay benefits -- its real beneficiaries are its own investors and the other corporate entities that it invests those premiums in, not its own client base. A parasite cannot be negotiated with. It has no purpose other than to ensure its own survival at the expense of its host.
Cut the parasite out -- the REST of the corporate world will adjust and find other ways to handle the financing/investment that the current health insurance industry currently provides.
(no subject)
That said, I must disclose that the only time I support the "death penalty" is when it's applied to corporate persons for extreme and ongoing malfeasance. A few judiciously-applied decharterings would shape the corporate-crime problem up right quickly.
(no subject)
The thing is, it's truly a bizarre concept to be able to create an artificial person; certainly, western civilization came to the idea fairly lately (say, the last half-millennium, roughly), and I don't think any of the other civilizations ever came up with the notion (although I'm not claiming definitive knowledge there; I could be wrong about other cultures' legal history). General incorporation laws (i.e., it doesn't take, literally, an act of congress or a state legislature to set up a corporation) are even more recent; a couple centuries at most.
The arguments in favor of easy incorporation and limited liability are certainly compelling ones; the benefits touted in civics classes are empirically real and substantial. At the same time, though, there are some real problems.
Corporations are much harder to punish than real people; you can't lock them up, and I have my doubts that the "death penalty" would work well either; the art of restructuring companies to diffuse or avoid responsibility was brought to a fine pitch of perfection by the early twentieth century. Fines sort of work, but unless they're so massive as to threaten the corporation's very existence, they don't seem to cause as much pain as a proportionate fine would cause a real person.
Corporations also seem to be strongly biased against having any moral sense. Yes, a strong senior executive can force a corporation to act morally sometimes. But the point is, s/he _has_ to force the behavior; it goes against the natural flow of corporate action. Left to themselves, corporations tend very strongly to be amoral sociopaths.
I don't have any magic wand to solve these problems, even if I were proclaimed Unquestioned World Dictator later this week, but they nag at me; there's got to be a way to keep most of the benefits while checking the worst of the drawbacks.
One thing that I think our current concept of a corporation has very wrong, from a social engineering standpoint, is that we start from the assumption that an "artificial person" has the same rights and privileges as a natural person, and then restrict them by law in an effort to control corporate behavior.
I think it would be better to start from the position that an artificial person has no rights or protections, none whatsoever, except as explicitly granted by law. That is, change the question from "what should corporations be prevented from doing" to "what should corporations be allowed to do".
So, in parallel with
Btw, see
this for an interesting read on the history of the notion of artificial people in English common law (from which American corporate law grew).