If this was a sports event or some really stadium-packing group like the Rolling Stones or U2, it would have been sold out in minutes and the scalpers out in force.  But as the event I am referring to is the battle over health care reform that will be fought out in the halls of Congress and over many months, tickets are still to be had. 

In any case, this promises to be one hell of a battle, even if it does go on for months.  Upwards of $2 trillion annually is at stake here in terms of the tab for health care in this country.  Entrenched forces are not going to walk away from that lightly and those attacking the status quo are going to have to be mighty determined if they are to make over the current system the way they want.

One thing about President Obama in his drive to reshape the health care system in the U.S. is that he has stayed on message and managed to get a lot of Democrats in Congress behind him.  Given the man’s track record of pulling off surprises, I would not be at all complacent if I were one of the industries to be affected.

Those industries, meanwhile, realized that simply saying no is not going to cut it with the President, the Congress and the public.  So they have made gestures-execs from six health care-related trade groups presented the President with a pledge in May to work to shave some $2 trillion or more over 10 years from the cost of health care.

By some accounts, however, these organizations immediately started to backpedal, saying that what they said was misrepresented or exaggerated.

What’s proving to be the galvanizing point of focus here is the so-called ‘public option,’ wherein the government could be a provider of insurance to those who aren’t covered by group or individual plans. 

The cries have already gone up about how the public option with the government’s muscle behind it would eventually crowd out private insurers from the market.  This, critics say, would spell the end of health care as we know it in this country.

I think it’s important for insurers and others involved in this battle to realize that for a lot of people a change that spells the end of health care as we know it in this country is not exactly the worst possible outcome.  Some of these people, in fact, might welcome such a development.

One such very vocal critic of insurers and their allies is Paul Krugman, Nobel Prize winning economist and New York Times columnist.  His June 5 column in the Times was headlined ‘Keeping Them Honest.”  And sorry to say, the ‘them’ he was referring to are health insurers.

Krugman argues, in fact, that only the public option will keep insurers honest.  His column ends, “Right now the health insurers are promising to deliver major cost savings.  But history shows that such promises can’t be trusted.  As President Obama said in his letter [to Senators Max Baucus and Edward Kennedy], we need a serious, real public option to keep the insurance companies honest.” 

This battle is just beginning to heat up.  Not only are Senate Democrats promising some kind of public option in any health care reform scheme, but more and more talk is filling the air about taxing health insurance benefits. 

Republicans, for the most part allies of the health insurance business as it is, are saying they’re being locked out of the legislative process and thus any bill won’t be bipartisan. 

The way this is shaping up, the summer of ‘09 could be one of the hottest on record.  Just what we journalists love.

That things are bad is no secret.  But every once in a while, as we slog through this meltdown, a statistic or set of data just pops out and reminds you that no matter how bad you thought things were, they’re worse.

What did it for me this week was reading through LIMRA International’s release on first quarter sales figures of the spectrum of life insurance products.

Even old-timers might have a hard time remembering when sales took such a nosedive, since as LIMRA’s CEO Bob Kerzner remarked, “…the last time quarterly sales dropped this much was in 1943.”  (And if you’re one of those who can sit around the cracker barrel and reminisce, “If you think this is bad, sonny, you should have been around in the summer of ‘43…”, well, all the more power to you.)

Overall, LIMRA reports, premium from individual life sales dropped, slid, plunged, plummeted, nosedived (take your pick) an amazing 26% from the year before.

Every product line was hit, LIMRA says, with variable life premium off a massive 61%.   Universal life, down 33%.  Variable UL, off 61%. 

The only two lines that didn’t enter double-digit loss territory were term (off  4%) and whole life (down 5%).

Additionally, totals for face amount and number of policies sold were off 8% in both cases.

These stats alone show how much people are hurting and how far down on the totem pole life insurance (unfortunately) sits when filling your stomach, keeping the roof over your head or the repo guys at bay are more important and pressing than what’s going to happen if you die.  Some of these people, after all, feel like they’re dying every day.

I can’t remember for a fact, but it seems to me that I’ve already used the mythic image of Sisyphus to describe the life insurance industry’s seemingly doomed challenge of getting Congress to approve an optional federal charter.  Just when the king of Corinth gets the stone almost to the top of the hill, down it goes. 

So, not to repeat ourselves, let’s turn to another myth to describe where the industry is now in what has come to be a decade-long quest.  My Webster’s gives this description of Tantalus: “a son of Zeus, doomed in the lower world to stand in water that always recedes when he tries to drink it and under branches of fruit that always remain just out of reach.”

Needless to say this is where the word tantalizing comes from.  And tantalizing is a good word for how the life business (or at least many of its companies) sees the prospect of an optional federal charter.  We’re not really sure how it’s going to work, but we know we’re going to like it. 

Actually, not knowing how it’s going to work may be part of the attraction for these companies, since they feel they are quite familiar with what they perceive as the clunkiness and annoyance of state insurance regulation.

There’s another factor going on here.  In two words: Regulatory envy. 

Life insurers are such a well-behaved bunch, but among those businesses that are financial colossi (banks, mutual funds, life insurers), they get the least respect.  This, of course, brings to mind another mythic figure: Rodney Dangerfield.

Life insurers look at banks, for instance, and are just green over the fact that banks can pick their charter and thus choose to be either federally or state regulated.  And if they choose to be federally regulated, boy oh boy, what a bag of goodies that brings with it.  Banks don’t have to be well-behaved, always minding their P’s & Q’s.  Banks can do all sorts of things that life insurers in their wildest dreams wouldn’t think of doing and their regulators will usually cheer them on or, at the very least, bite their tongues. 

Life just isn’t fair when you don’t have a federal regulator in your court.

So, what happens when-once again–the water seems to be within the reach of Tantalus?  What else?  The New York Times writes an editorial saying in effect that drinking the water is the worst thing that could happen anyway for poor old Tant and everybody else.

And so on May 21 the Times blasted the OFC bill introduced by Rep. Melissa Bean, D-Ill., and Rep. Ed Royce, R-Cal., saying, “If the bill were enacted, the race to the regulatory depths would continue, and the nation would be headed in exactly the wrong regulatory direction.”

Needless to say, those officials who have been doing the heavy lifting on this issue for years reacted with fury.  The Times “has it wrong,” said the American Council of Life Insurers.  The “editorial is misleading at best,” said a spokesman for the Financial Services Roundtable.  

Pretty strong words for organizations that usually step more gingerly when criticizing the newspaper of record.  

Then, providentially it would seem, the very next day Rep. Paul Kanjorski, D-Pa., introduced his own bill that creates an Office of Insurance Information in the Treasury Department. The OII is often seen as a precursor to an OFC, a foot in the door of federal regulation, so to speak.  Life insurance officials applauded.

This bad news-good news rhythm should now be second nature to the life industry in regard to an OFC. And as every setback makes the prospect of success so much more tantalizing, the water seems more and more like nectar and the fruit positively ambrosial.