... I find it vaguely disturbing how the insurance and pharmaceutical companies are so often conflated (in the entire debate, not just in your particular post).

Pharmaceutical companies actually make products that enhance the survivability, convenience and comfort of the human condition. Furthermore, pharmaceuticals is a technically sophisticated industry with high capital requirements and long lead times. This being the case, it needs government support, either in the form of direct subsidies, underwriting of risk or some other way to suppress the market mechanisms that are so manifestly ill-equipped to deal with lead times longer than a quarter or so.

The health insurance "industry," on the other hand, is (like the private pension funds "industry") a purely parasitical entity that offers no redeeming features of any kind. Like a rat infestation, it arises because the sovereign puts insufficient or effort into maintaining basic infrastructure, such as hospitals, sewers and retirement benefits.

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.