Will Trump Administration Back Rules Treating Health Insurance as a Utility, Not Luxury?

On June 14, 2016 a Federal Court ruled that broadband internet is as essential to American as phones, electricity, water and sewer systems and should be available to all Americans as a utility, rather than a luxury that doesn’t need close government supervision. In the United States, public utilities are often natural monopolies because the infrastructure required producing and delivering a product such as electricity or water is very expensive to build and maintain. As a result, they are often government monopolies, or if privately owned, the sectors are specially regulated by a public utilities commission which severely limits the profits for the private utility company and the associated costs passed on to consumers of that utility.

There is nothing more essential to the lives and well being of Americans than health insurance and therefore healthcare is the ultimate utility. Of all the developed nations on the planet, safe quality affordable American health care continues to be a luxury and not a utility for most citizens. Most Americans remain one major illness away from personal financial ruin due to under-insurance and 10’s of millions of Americans are uninsured. Most American locales have only one or two major Health insurance corporations serving the area creating natural monopoly’s which charge citizens exorbitant premiums and co-payments for healthcare along with rationing of access, diagnostics and treatments.

This lack of capitalistic competition in most major markets among health insurance companies results yearly in hundreds of billions of healthcare dollars redistributed into the pockets of insurance company executives, shareholders, bondholders, 1 million insurance company bureaucrats and their patron politicians. Unregulated insurance company profits (exactly what the Utility concept prevents) results in limited expensive preventive, medical, surgical and palliative care for a large portion of Americans...