D?j? moo?

It seems as though everyone has had one of those mind-flash experiences when they are sure they are reliving a previous experience. It happened to me during — of all things — a speaking engagement last week. I was using disability income as an example of a market that would help agents reposition, differentiate and reinvent themselves in the face of the massive health care and financial services “reform” rained down on us by the U.S. legislative and executive branches.

An audience member stopped and asked my opinion (always a dangerous place to go) on factors that contributed to the near collapse of individual disability markets in the ’90s. One aspect of the answer focused on the effects of managed care on the physician markets — especially as related to surgeons. I repeated the managed scare admonition of “faceless company bureaucrats and accountants making your health care decisions.”

I literally stopped myself in mid-answer to add, “Of course, many of the same people who were offering that warning in the ‘old days’ are now proponents of that exact same system. All you have to do to forward to present day is exchange the word ‘company’ for the word ‘government.’”

The day after my talk, the “old days” of managed care surfaced once again. We’ve previously discussed Massachusetts’ decision to capitate physicians in an effort to stem the tide of red ink in their state health care experiment. The news reports coming from Beacon Hill were aghast that this move had not actually succeeded in lowering costs. OK, all together now, “been there, done that.”

I think this is just a bit too much to qualify for normal garden variety d?j? vu. This is starting to fall under the heading of “d?j? moo” — we’ve heard this manure before.