Scapegoat

People desperate for success frequently throw others under the bus. They desperately seek a scapegoat to further ideas which havd little merit on their own.

The line of reasoning in the health care debate goes something like this: the insurance companies are greedy, so the health care industry would be better off if it were managed by the federal government.

This seems shaky to me, so I decided to check the facts. Are insurance companies really profiteering on the backs of the American health care consumer?

Let's use Google as the benchmark. Why? Because the administration loves Google, and continually offers it as a paragon of American industry. In 2009, Google's profit margin was 28%.

How do the profit margins of the top 3 insurance companies in the Fortune 500 compare to this benchmark?

In 2009, MetLife (#39 in the Fortune 500) posted a profit margin of negative 5%. Prudential's (#84) profit margin was 9%, and AFLAC's (#152) was 8%.

Insurance companies aren't perfect, and health care costs are definitely a national concern, but the "greedy insurance companies are the problem" claim is patently false. They simply aren't profiteering at our expense.