Do insurance companies want to defeat Obamacare?

Many in Obama’s White House – like David Axelrod and Nancy Ann DeParle – believe the answer is yes.

Many on the left believe the answer is yes.

Just today, Don McCanne of Physicians for a National Health Program, cited a National Journal story reporting that the insurance industry last year funneled millions of dollars to the Chamber of Commerce for attack ads against Obamacare.

“AHIP, Aetna, Cigna, Humana, Kaiser Foundation Health Plans, UnitedHealth Group and Wellpoint have lied to us, telling us that they support reform while secretly spending millions on a campaign to defeat it,” McCanne wrote. “Congress and President Obama now have every reason to show these crooks the door, and they should do so immediately.”

But political activist Allan Nairn says the answer is no.

Nairn says that the insurance industry actually likes Obamacare – and wants it to pass.

“The insurance companies are not really against the bill,” Nairn said last week. “They are opposing it to try to get the best deal they can. They are getting a huge handout now with tens of millions of forced customers. But they want even more customers.”

“If they wanted to defeat the bill, they could. They could kill it in a minute. All they would have to do is get Joseph Lieberman or Ben Nelson or one of the other sixty members of the Democratic coalition in the Senate to pull out and the bill would be dead.”

“Obviously they have chosen not to do that – which indicates that the companies want the bill to pass. It’s a windfall for them. But you stay on the record opposing it and you get more and more concessions.”

What if their opposition looks like it will lead to the defeat of the bill?

“Then they would pull back,” Nairn said. “They are playing a balancing game – and so far, it’s working out well.”

“The private insurance industry is a cancer on the system,” Nairn said. “It’s one corporate sector hurting all of the other corporate sectors with pure economic inefficiency – just paper shuffling. It puts a burden on the American private economy that doesn’t exist in any of the other industrial countries.”

“There is a clear solution that would benefit American corporations – eliminate the private insurance industry.”

“At first, it seemed as if Obama was thinking along those lines, but he ended up with a bill that will expand the cancer. We’ll see whether the Democrats pay a political price for that. It will certainly hurt people.”