Stories like this just really give you a warm and fuzzy feeling about the insurance industry:

Health insurance giant Aetna is planning to force up to 650,000 clients to drop their coverage next year as it seeks to raise additional revenue to meet profit expectations.

In a third-quarter earnings conference call in late October, officials at Aetna announced that in an effort to improve on a less-than-anticipated profit margin in 2009, they would be raising prices on their consumers in 2010. The insurance giant predicted that the company would subsequently lose between 300,000 and 350,000 members next year from its national account as well as another 300,000 from smaller group accounts.

Let people suffer so that they can increase profit – how American of them! And these are the kind of practices the GOP seems content on letting exist.

I wonder how many of those 650,000 have some sort of pre-existing condition? Dropping them would be a nice cost savings to Aetna, even though those people will have problems getting coverage anywhere.

For those that still think we don’t need some sort of public option, I’m sorry buy you are seriously delusioned about our insurance companies.