THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

David Lazarus asks this question about the thieving health insurance cabal and no, he is not working on his stand up comedy routine. He is asking the question we all should ask before calling or writing or e-mailing our congress critters and demand that they not screw us again.

"Everything's different this time," answered Robert Zirkelbach, a spokesman for America's Health Insurance Plans, a leading industry group. "Everybody learned valuable lessons from 15 years ago."

So now we're looking at kinder, gentler insurance companies?

"Unlike last time around, our industry has made a commitment to come to the table with workable solutions," Zirkelbach said. "We're taking a dramatically different approach to reform than we did 15 years ago. Back then, we opposed reform. Now we support it."

I feel better already.

But when I asked Zirkelbach about the $2 trillion in cost reductions that the healthcare industry says it can come up with over 10 years, he said the details were still being hammered out.

As for Obama's proposal for a public plan to compete with private ones and keep costs down, Zirkelbach said, "We have significant concerns about that, absolutely."

And he wasn't very committed to the insurers' recent claim that they'll stop denying coverage to sick people or those with preexisting conditions. Zirkelbach said this would be contingent on lawmakers approving a national mandate for health insurance -- in other words, a requirement that everyone has to buy the industry's products.

Are those changes still possible without a mandate?

"Probably not," Zirkelbach replied.

The only way to get these changes is a public option plan similar to Medicare that will force the insurance industry to give up their scams and frauds if they want to compete. Using the example of a couple in their late 50's who have lost their employment coverage and are paying open market prices, he reminds us what is so important about this push for health care insurance reform,

"It's wiped out all our savings," Monica told me. "But we're at an age where if anything happened to us, we'd be paying far more.

"We can't afford health insurance," she said. "But we can't afford not to have it."

The same goes for the rest of us. That's what Obama and members of Congress need to remember as healthcare executives start haggling over terms -- or if, yet again, they get up and leave the table.

This isn't about their needs. It's about ours.

So what will it be, are you for yourself or against yourself?