So, much has been made this week of the fact that the Republican National Committee, throughout its longstanding berserker campaign against women seeking control of their own bodies, has in fact been providing comprehensive healthcare insurance to its own employees – including female employees – for almost 20 years. Many fingers were pointed over the hypocrisy of attempting to prohibit abortion access for all women in America by every means possible, while covering abortion care for its own employees under their internal health insurance plan. (This in fact is in keeping with right-wing approaches to the issue generally: their values legendarily evaporate when it’s their personal interests at stake, and stories of women’s clinics providing abortion care to the same women who were picketing those clinics before and after the procedure are legion.)

Predictably, Michael Steele, the hapless RNC head, announced less than 24 hours after the story broke that that coverage provision had been rescinded unilaterally. The usual right-wing hysteria has erupted, with demands that people be fired and angry denunciations that donors to the RNC had not been allowed to deny healthcare to its female employees as they wanted to do. As Ben Smith rightly points out, not one female employee of the RNC – the ones whose coverage has now been stripped without their consultation (and presumably without any reduction in their premium contributions) – has been quoted or consulted in this move.

I note also that pro-choice ideology within the Republican party has run at about a steady 35-38% for most of a decade (a recent poll shows it down somewhat among Republicans, but is widely regarded as an outlier). I presume the large majority of those are women. Assuming further that women are half the GOP membership, that would mean that roughly two-thirds of GOP women are pro-choice (I suspect they’re actually less than half the membership, which would push the prevalence of pro-choice ideology even higher within that smaller female group). Now, I don’t know if the RNC employee base is representative of the Republican Party generally, but if it is, that would mean that about a third of its staff, and about two-thirds of all its female staff, are in favor of abortion rights. There are other factors to be considered, for which we don’t have data (what percentage favor having abortion covered in their health plan, as opposed to its just being legal; to what degree the RNC staff skew even crazier on abortion than the rank and file; what percentage of the staff are female; and so on), but any way you slice it it seems inevitable that there is at least some considerable degree of support for abortion services among the RNC’s staff, to say nothing of the GOP generally. Yet the RNC leadership revoked their own staff’s coverage without consultation, and without the slightest apparent consideration for that staff’s wishes, needs, or rights.

The message is clear enough, and, I suppose, fair and consistent in that peculiar GOP way: for Republicans, hurting women is more important than anything else – certainly more important than providing real healthcare for an entire nation, but more important also than seeing to the needs of their own membership. The Republican National Committee – a body that exists solely to cater to the interests and welfare of registered Republicans – stripped healthcare services that had been available for almost 20 years away from Republican women employed in the service of that body and their party, without the slightest hesitation or apparently without even talking to them.  Within the highest levels of the Republican Party itself, your lack of status as a woman trumps your preferential status as a Republican.

Michael Steele could have just made it much more simple and direct:

Goldman Sachs has just issued a helpful report for the insurance industry, identifying the profit potential for them in various likely outcomes of the current healthcare access reform initiative. Their conclusion: the best thing for the insurance companies is no reform at all, followed by the weakest possible reform; the worst thing for them is real reform with universal access and a publicly-backed plan option.

In other words: the current disaster of a system is the one that provides the greatest possible profit potential to the insurance industry; any effort at increasing access to care is against that industry’s interests, and a robust and successful reform effort is the worst possible thing from an industry whose profits are entirely dependent on charging the highest possible premiums and delivering the least possible care.

The Senate Finance Committee bill, which Goldman’s analysts conclude is the version most likely to survive the legislative process, is described as the “base” scenario. Under that legislation (which did not include a public plan) the earnings per share for the top five insurers would grow an estimated five percent from 2010 through 2019. And yet, the “variance with current valuation” — essentially, what the value of the stock is on the market — is projected to drop four percent.

Things are much worse, Goldman estimates, for legislation that resembles what was considered and (to a certain extent) passed by the House of Representatives. This is, the firm deems, the “bear case” scenario — in which earnings per share for the top five insurers would decline an estimated one percent from 2010 through 2019 and the variance with current valuation is projected to be negative 36 percent.

What the firm sees as the best path forward for the private insurance industry’s bottom line is, to be blunt, inaction.

The study’s authors advise that if no reform is passed, earnings per share would grow an estimated ten percent from 2010 through 2019, and the value of the stock would rise an estimated 59 percent during that time period.

The next best thing for the insurance industry would be if the legislation passed by the Senate Finance Committee is watered down significantly.

Coincidentally, no doubt, the report arrives from Goldman Sachs – recipient of uncountable billions in public bailout dollars for their executives’ bonuses, from the Obama administration – just as the healthcare access reform plan being pursued right now by that same administration is nearing its final legislative conflict. Goldman helpfully notes in a disclaimer that the firm “does and seeks to do business with companies covered in its research reports.”

All you have to do to see how utterly repulsive the healthcare insurance industry is is to simply watch how they talk about their own business. It is impossible to be disgusted enough by an industry that – uniquely in the industrialized world – treats people’s bodies, health, and lives as saleable commodities in a free market in misery.