Aug. 27, 2009 (Arkansas Times) --

It is time that someone separated the winners from the losers in national health-care reform if something approximating the bills circulating in Congress becomes law.

You can't tell from all the media commercials, business and medical forums, town-hall ragings or the big bus rallies like the one organized this week at the Capitol by former Congressman Asa Hutchinson and Americans for Prosperity, the right-wing lobby financed by the tobacco companies and polluting industries, which has added health insurance reform to its agenda of killing clean-indoor-air laws and climate-change legislation.

You can't distinguish the winners because in those forums everyone is a loser since they claim that the government would start running all health care. It is provable nonsense. The only government-run health care under any of the bills would continue to be the current government programs, principally Medicare and veterans medicine, which happen to be the best run and best liked insurance programs in the world. Medicare, which was designed by the great socialist Wilbur D. Mills of Kensett, Ark., is government-run only in the sense that it pays the bills. The government makes far fewer decisions about care than under any private plan in the country.

So here at EncyclopedicServices.com, we have prepared an objective primer on the winners and losers.

You can identify the biggest winners yourself by locating the loudest whiners. Some of them were at the table at Little Rock Monday complaining about how health-care reform would bankrupt insurance companies and drive doctors out of the profession because of the puny pay they would get.

For the big insurance companies it depends on whether the legislation passes with or without people having the option of buying a low-cost government-sponsored plan. With a government option, the bills would be merely a bonanza for the insurers, without highway robbery. They will get 20 to 40 million new customers in one fell swoop without having to run an ad or mail a circular, and the government will help millions of people pay for policies from Blue Cross, UnitedHealthcare, Aetna (NYSE:AET) or Cigna. (NYSE:CI)

Tom Hamburger, formerly a Little Rock boy now part of a crack team that marks the sparrow's fall on political money for the Los Angeles Times, reported this week that the insurance companies, thanks to $35 million spent lobbying Washington during the first six months of this year alone, were poised to reap a financial windfall, regardless of what happens to the public option. They bitterly oppose the public option, but you can't blame them for wanting to count their margins in the billions rather than millions.

Physicians? Big, big winners. Even the conservative docs at the American Medical Association, who fought Medicare for years and then got rich from it, support the House bills.