There is an interesting editorial talking about how we need to have public financing of elections in order to remove corruption from insurance companies and finally get the Healthy Wisconsin we apparently all want.  While an interesting premise, it is completely wrong, and ignores basic history of how government works:

Health care is looming as a major issue in the 2008 elections, but a root cause of soaring health care costs is being ignored both by the public and the press, at least until now. I’m referring to a very conflicted system of political campaign financing.

Think about it. Had the insurance industry not been a major contributor, we'd have fixed our health care system years ago. Its biggest single problem is the huge portion of total health care costs – about 31 percent, according to a group called Physicians for a National Health Program and others – that are consumed by the insurance and billing bureaucracy without ever providing direct patient care. Costs for marketing, broker sales commissions, actuarial costs, gatekeepers, high executive salaries, increasing shareholder profits, even the high costs of their lobbying and campaign contributions are passed on to the patient (and in most cases employers, who have been taking their jobs offshore to avoid the costs).

Eliminate that waste and we could expand health care coverage to 100 percent of our people for the same dollars we spend to cover just 85 percent today.

The basic premise of the editorial is that the insurance companies are lobbying to keep their stranglehold on the market, and that if we were to eliminate their dollars, then the problems would go away.  Wrong.  Companies lobby with government because government controls more and more of what we do, and how we do it.  It is that simple.  Lobbying efforts and money spent has dramatically increased over the last 20 years.  In fact, it has increased along with the size of government.

But what is the cause, and what is the effect?  Government regulation causes increased lobbying.  Simply put, if government has the power, then people are going to spend their money to direct that power in the direction they want.  By encouraging stupid schemes like Healthy Wisconsin, which will give significantly more power to an unelected board in Madison, and you are only going to encourage corruption as insurance companies try to vie for that money.

The solution to campaign corruption and increased lobbying isn't to regulate it any more.  The solution is to shrink government back to levels where there is less need to lobby for anything at all.  The larger government becomes, the more of a magnet it will be.  It's just that simple.  If you want insurance companies to answer to the people, then you need to give the people (and by that I mean individuals) back their power.  You need to let people individually buy their insurance.

If you do that, insurance companies will have to provide good services and lower prices to compete because they can't simply write a relatively cheap campaign donation to Governor Doyle.  If you give all the power to one person, or a small group of people, then it's easy for them to be corrupted.  Spread that power across the entire population, and that corruption goes away.