George Will has decided to bring his and WaPo’s destroyed credibility on climate change and arctic ice melting to the health care reform debate. You see, the wealthy, healthy, fully covered George Will has concluded that there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with America’s wonderfully competitive health care system.

Will apparently believes the current system isn’t broken, even though the industry itself admits it is and is scrambling to offer "reforms" to avoid more radical changes. Will adds that if there are minor tweaks that might be helpful, the best way to do that is to make sure government does not force the private insurance system to compete with a public option.

Above all, Will pleads, save us from a government-sponsored health option, even though varieties of successful public health systems exist all over the world, providing universal coverage, equal and/or often better care than the US system and costing only half to (at worst) two thirds of what America pays.

Will fears that if people had the choice of a public plan, they’d choose it because its cost structure is inherently more efficient. In Will’s contorted philosophy, that’s not fair competition, so the solution is to deny that choice to protect the inefficient. What he’s describing, however, sounds like a natural monopoly condition — as in single payer? — but never mind that.

But none of these basic facts, let alone any of the millions of personal horror stories that literally kill thousands of people and bankrupt thousands more, intrudes upon Will’s thinking.

According to Will, we don’t have a major problem of leaving 46 million uninsured. No, many of those folks are uncovered by choice, because they’re simply in transition between jobs — presumably from the jobs they lost thanks to the Bush/Bernanke global financial calamity to the jobs that probably won’t exist without massive government stimulus and an intelligent industrial policy — policies that Will adamantly opposes. More here.

And let’s not forget that Will is one of the zealots who insisted that hundreds of thousands of auto industry workers should be forced through bankruptcy to lose the health coverage they’d worked and bargained for for decades.

But Will doesn’t just blame workers for losing their jobs and coverage. Another chunk of the uninsured are just a bunch of immigrants who shouldn’t have come here anyway. They should just go back.

Will then pretends that everyone else is fine, ignoring countless surveys and studies (here, here, here, here and here) that show that millions of "insured" people are in fact "underinsured" or de facto uninsured even though they pay premiums. They simply can’t afford the co-payments and deductibles, so they choose not to get care. For Will, these folks are insured, and it’s their choice how they spend their money, so what’s the problem? He apparently hasn’t talked to anyone outside the Green Room.

Will is at his most disingenuous as an avowed zealot for private markets. Apparently he is unaware that in the health care "market," the way the private insurance sector profits is through rationing care and denying coverage. It makes money by denying coverage, denying claims, delaying payments and hassling health care providers. And it pads its profits by hiring and rewarding legions of people whose sole function is to find even the slightest hint a consumer withheld information about previous conditions, and then uses that as an excuse to rescind their insurance coverage.

But what truly takes away your breath — and other people’s health — is Will’s fantasy that we have an efficient competitive market in the provision of care and insurance coverage. He cites the existence of 1300 insurance firms but then conceals the results of numerous studies showing substantial concentration throughout the industry, to the point where the vast majority of regions have only 1, 2, or 3 options. Every economics text book tells us that condition produces less supply, worse quality and higher prices.

If the market Will worships is uncompetitive, then his prescription for the "protractedly uninsured" — "give them money" — is not a remedy for a corrupt, inhumane and excessively costly system. Instead it’s Will’s excuse to prop up that corrupt, inefficient system with billions in federal tax dollars.

George Will’s health care plan: I’ve got mine; screw you.

Update: Digby picks up on this story about how our system forces people to self-ration themseles out of needed care.