In their fight for a good public option, Health Care for America Now has unleashed a new campaign that addresses the core problem of affordable health insurance coverage - namely, where are you gonna go? There's no competition:

“Health insurance companies are exempt from antitrust regulations, and as a result, a small number of very large companies have almost total control of the health insurance marketplace. These big insurers aren’t competing for our business by lowering costs. Instead, they are driving up prices as high as the market will bear because they know we have nowhere else to turn,” said Richard Kirsch, National Campaign Manager, Health Care for America Now.

“We need the choice of a public health insurance option in the marketplace to inject real competition. Private insurers will have to work a lot harder to get costs under control and put people’s health before their profits if they know consumers have a viable health insurance alternative that’s not beholden to Wall Street.”

In May, Health Care for America Now released a national report (pdf) and state-specific reports detailing the extreme consolidation in the health insurance marketplace, and during a conference call debuting the report, Senator Chuck Schumer said, “This is the starkest evidence yet that the private health care insurance market is in bad need of some healthy competition. A public health insurance option is critical to ensure the greatest amount of choice possible for consumers.”