Most likely you’ve all seen a Bond movie (or three), but for those who are new to the concept, let me outline Bond Supervillain Syndrome:

Dashing, womanizing, and ultimately cold-blooded killer James Bond has been captured by a villain while on assignment by Her Majesty’s Secret Service. The stakes are very high; often the villain has by this point assembled a doomsday device or at least stolen a nuclear weapon; sometimes they have brought the United States and the Soviet Union to the brink of nuclear war.

At this point, a rational human being in the villain’s position would take a remarkably simple course of action: kill Mr. Bond. Quickly, efficiently. Get it over with and move on to World Domination, or at least a comfortable retirement on some warm tropical isle. Instead these old-school villains invariably set up some elaborate death trap or other and leave Mr. Bond to escape, now knowing the full details of their scheme and positioned correctly to defeat it. Hilarity ensues.

Why bring this up? Well, after a long year of secret backroom deals, ridiculously heavy lobbying, and writing the damn bill themselves, the Health Insurance Industry had victory in sight thanks to the legislative abortion known as ‘Health Care Reform’ in the Senate. All they had to do was shoot Mr. Bond in the back of the head, dump his body somewhere, and keep quiet for a couple of months.

Instead, what did they do?

Anthem Blue Cross is telling many of its approximately 800,000 customers who buy individual coverage — people not covered by group rates — that its prices will go up March 1 and may be adjusted “more frequently” than its typical yearly increases.

The insurer declined to say how high it is increasing rates. But brokers who sell these policies say they are fielding numerous calls from customers incensed over premium increases of 30% to 39%, saying they come on the heels of similar jumps last year.

That’s right; instead of keeping their heads down and getting the Senate bill passed, ensuring them government mandated profits in the billions and forcing millions of Americans into their clutches for fear of the IRS… they decided to set up a winch over the piranha tank.

Tom Simmons, the president of a consulting and design firm with four employees in Oakland, said he had recently read about the Anthem rate hikes when he received a letter from his insurance company, Blue Shield of California, telling him that his monthly family health premium would increase from $908 per month to $1,596 per month, an increase of almost 76 percent.

…

The recent news that WellPoint’s Anthem Blue Cross health insurance company in California wanted to increase premiums for individual policyholders as much as 39 percent is further evidence the current health system is not sustainable. And a survey by the Center for American Progress Action Fund found that California isn’t the only state where WellPoint is hiking individual premium rates by double-digit percentages. In fact, double-digit hikes have been implemented or are pending in at least 11 other states among the 14 where WellPoint’s Blue Cross Blue Shield companies are active: California, Colorado, Connecticut, Georgia, Indiana, Maine, Nevada, New Hampshire, New York, Virginia, and Wisconsin.

This sort of melodramatic price-gouging is hardly new, as a report yesterday indicated. Insurance industry greed has driven the unsustainable growth in health insurance costs for many years now. However, the difference between villainy and cartoonish supervillainy comes when you take that extra step to rub salt in the wounds of someone you’ve already beaten.

And that’s what I think boosters of the Exchange model (sans public option) fail to understand. Supporters of the Senate plan believe that it will curb the rise in costs, that having information available to the end consumer, along with some limited protection from the most egregious consumer abuses, will be sufficient to bring the insurance companies under control.

The flaw in this thinking is obvious, given the insurance industry’s diagnosis of BSS: they can’t be controlled by anyone. They’re completely unhinged. No matter how many mechanisms you put in place to encourage them to put away their death traps, power down the laser beams and behave in a slightly more modest, though no less ruthless manner, they will return to abusing the consumer, again and again. They can’t stop; it’s a compulsion. Eventually they’ll destroy themselves.

The only question is whether we’ll be trapped with them in the secret volcano base when the time comes.