While discussing a new loophole that insurance companies may end up using to attempt to avoid covering some of the most expensive participants in their health care plans, Fox's Brit Hume did his best to attempt to deflect any responsibility for the bad behavior on the insurance companies themselves.
It's just what they do, people, so get over it:
WALLACE: Brit, we're also learning, and not surprisingly, that some insurers are finding a way around the requirement that they must accept all customers regardless of their physical condition, whether they have a pre-existing condition. For instance, some people with serious diseases, they're saying, well, the pill that you must take to stay alive, or to alleviate your condition, that won't be covered. So they found a loophole.
HUME: That's what insurance companies do, they try to make their risk pools as narrowly drawn as possible so that they can avoid having to pay out the benefits. That's what they do. And the law was written in such a way that apparently there are opportunities for them to do that. It's what -- how insurance works. If you have too much risk in your pool, you don't make money, you don't do business, you go down. I question how terribly widespread this is, but I have no doubt it happens. I think the problem, though, is the insurance companies could be blamed for this and the administration will no doubt, and its defenders will no doubt try to do that.
The problem is that the ObamaCare rollout and much of the policy itself to the extent people are feeling, there's been such a disaster that I think the law, and the policy, gets the blame when anything goes wrong, whether it is the insurance company's fault or whether it is the law's fault.
And that's exactly why we need laws and regulations that are going to put a stop to those sorts of abuses, because you sure can't count on them to regulate themselves or behave well out of the goodness of any of their CEO's hearts. They care about one thing, and that's making a profit.
You know, maybe if the talking heads on Fox and the rest of our corporate media spent half the time asking politicians what they're going to do to fix any problems that arise with the law, instead of letting them blather on about repealing it as they did with Paul Ryan this Sunday, our politicians would actually feel some pressure to take care of the problems with the Affordable Care Act instead of just using them as a political cudgel.
They don't care if the problems are fixed any more than they and Republicans care if Americans have access to health care in the first place.
