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Insurance executives during a September meeting assured investors that, no matter what happens in health system reform, their companies would continue to exist.

[..]

“I believe the private system is important because it brings innovation, it brings energy, it brings change, it brings ideas that are often used in the public sector system as well,” said Richard Collins, senior vice president for underwriting, pricing and health care economics at UnitedHealthcare. “I think we can have both a public and private system.”

But why aren’t executives scared of a public option any more? Because the public option as written in the two bills which contain it is so weak that it will not have significant, if any, pricing power.

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Minority Leader John Boehner, to Politico:

“I’m still trying to find the first American to talk to who’s in favor of the public option, other than a member of  Congress or the administration” said Boehner, whose sole recent foray into a public discussion of health care reform was a tea-party-style event in Ohio a few weeks back. “I’ve not talked to one and I get to a lot of places,” he told reporters at his weekly press availability. “I’ve not had anyone come up to me — I know I’m inviting them — and lobby for the public option.”

Just ponder for a moment about what it means if John Boehner isn’t lying — because as we know, it’s wrong for politicians to lie and they almost never, ever do — but that he really, honestly has never met anyone who was in favor of the public option during this entire debate.

Let us all pause to reflect the sheer magnitude of the insular, self-inflating bubble that would be required of Boehner to never meet or talk to a single American that thought that way, when 2/3rds of the country do, and the majority of people in his own state do. He must roll to and from work in a giant, government-provided hamster ball.

“Wall Street has now come up with a financial instrument called ‘Life Settlements,’ where investors purchase ill or elderly people’s life insurance policies up-front and save 40 cents on the dollar, bundle them, and when the policyholders die, investors get paid. So Wall Street is no longer like some financial criminal saying, ‘Your money or your life!’ Now they’re saying, ‘All of the above!’”

—Stephen Colbert

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In other words, the Federal Reserve alone bought $722 billion of mortgages and agency debt when only $686 billion in new mortgages were issued.  So, through August, the Fed bought more than 100% of the entire supply of new (purchase) mortgages in 2009.

That’s not a free housing market; that’s a market bought, owned, and sustained by the Federal Reserve’s willingness to print up three quarters of a trillion dollars out of thin air.