'The state's largest for-profit health insurer is asking California physicians to look for conditions it can use to cancel their new patients' medical coverage," said the first line of an expose in the Los Angeles Times earlier this month. The subject was Blue Cross' practice of enlisting doctors to help them deny the claims of sick individuals.

What's strange, however, is that everyone acted like the insurer was doing something wrong. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger accused them of asking doctors to "rat out the patients." Hillary Clinton gave the company a similar lashing, in the same tone of moral outrage used by most of those quoted in the article. Within a few days, the policy was ended.

But Blue Cross officials weren't doing anything wrong. They were doing exactly what we've asked them to do: They were following the incentives of the modern insurance market.

It's a common complaint that health insurers don't actually offer "insurance." As generally defined, insurance is a form of risk management that individuals use to protect themselves against unpredictable loss -- a car accident, say, or a house fire. Health insurance, by contrast, is a form of risk pooling that individuals use to smooth out lifetime healthcare costs. Heath insurance does not insure us against risks so much as it insulates us against costs. We pay regular premiums so we don't have to directly pay for irregular care.

Not all of us, however, make this deal with insurers. About 50 million Americans are uninsured, and tens of millions more are underinsured. There's no law that says we all must have insurance or that insurance companies must agree to cover us. Given that, it's natural that insurers -- which are, after all, for-profit companies, not government agencies or public trusts -- turn their attention to making deals with the most profitable among us and avoiding deals (or finding ways to break contracts) with the least profitable.

That's exactly what we would expect them to do. We are using them to minimize our risk, and they are selective about us to minimize theirs. So is it any surprise that they compete over which of them can be the most sophisticated about cherry-picking the healthy from the unhealthy (stories abound of insurers in offices with a "broken elevator," so only those who can walk 10 flights of stairs can apply) and which is the most adept at canceling policies once they become unprofitable?

This is the competition within our insurance industry, and it is not good for us. That can be a bit counterintuitive in a country like ours, where all competition is thought to benefit the consumer. But just as competition among drug dealers does not aid the neighborhood, competition among insurers does not aid the ill. It might if they were competing to deliver better care to the sick, rather than trying to figure out how to avoid delivering any care to the sick at all. But they're not.

Indeed, their inattention to actual care is startling. For instance, the U.S., for all its technological advancement, has among the lowest adoption of cost-saving, care-improving health information technology in the world. That is the fault, in part, of our insurers, who have not forced its adoption among care providers.

In the current system, insurance companies add negative value -- which is to say, they make healthcare worse, not better. And here's why: It is actually against their interest for insurers to compete on giving us the best care. It's not simply that they're not doing it, but given the structure of the marketplace, they shouldn't do it.

Imagine that Insurer X works with its providers to develop the best diabetes protocols in the country. And it begins advertising this fact. What happens on Day Two? It's flooded with individuals suffering from diabetes, or individuals who fear they will one day be suffering from diabetes. These people, in the current system, are a bad deal. Not only is it nearly impossible to insure them at a profit, but pooling their costs (which is what insurers do, after all) raises premiums for all the insurer's other customers.

Over time, that encourages healthy folks contracting with that insurer to quit the pool and go f