The Corporate Crime of Selling Private Health Insurance
In most of the world, it is a corporate crime to sell private health insurance.That’s because most countries insure their citizens as a matter of right.
Private insurers dilute the public pool.
One nation, one payer.
Medicare for all.
Everybody in, nobody out.
No bills from the doctor.
No bills from the hospital.
No deductibles.
No co-pays.
No in network.
No out of network.
No corporate profits.
No threat of bankruptcy from health bills.
Health insurance will be the number one domestic political issue in the USA in 2008.
Polls indicate that the majority of the American people want single payer.
But who will deliver?
On Saturday, the Center for American Progress Action Fund and Service Employees International Union (SEIU) sponsored a forum in Las Vegas for presidential candidates to discuss health care.
No Republicans accepted.
Seven Democrats accepted.
All the candidates at the forum agreed that universal health care was the goal. (Even the Business Roundtable and the insurance industry now say they want “universal health care.”)
But only one – Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) – accepts the only answer that will work – single payer.
Medicare for all.
The rest – including Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Chris Dodd, Bill Richardson, Mike Gravel, and John Edwards – want some mixture of public and private health insurance.
They know this public/private mix won’t work – the healthy wealthy will buy private insurance, the sick poor will sign on with the government – and the government program will be crippled.
But they don’t have the guts to stand up to the private insurance industry and say – get out.
Kucinich has introduced single payer legislation (HR 676) in Congress that would make it unlawful to sell private health insurance for benefits that are medically necessary.
Last week, we entered the belly of the beast – the American Health Insurance Plans (AHIP) 2007 National Policy Forum at the Capital Hilton in Washington, D.C.
AHIP is the trade association for the companies that will be sacked if single payer becomes law.
We walked into a session titled – Coverage for All Americans: Putting Access at the Top of the National Agenda.
The session was moderated by AHIP President Karen Ignagni.
Not once during the 90-minute session was single payer mentioned.
Universal coverage, yes.
Single payer, no.
But during the discussion, the geography of nowhere was laid out.
On one side, Ron Pollack, executive director of Families USA had teamed up with AHIP’s Ignagni.
On the other, Bill Novelli, CEO of AARP and John Catsellani, president of the Business Roundtable.
AARP and the Business Roundtable have joined with SEIU to form something called Divided We Fail.
Divided We Fail is a corporate liberal answer to single payer.
All Americans should have access to affordable quality health care.
All Americans should have peace of mind about their future long-term financial security.
Families USA and AHIP do a separate dance but mouth similar platitudes.
But both Divided We Fail and Families USA/AHIP dismiss single payer as unworkable.
On the single payer side is Kucinich, about 60 members of the House of Representatives, the California Nurses Association, Physicians for a National Health Program, and Health Care Now.
Kucinich is now the single payer champion.
The problem with Kucinich, of course, is that if he doesn’t get the nomination, he will take the stage at the Democratic Convention in 2008 in Denver – as he did in 2004 in Boston – raise the hand of the corporate nominee and endorse the corporate platform.
Then where will we be?
Nowhere.
Again.
To visit the Crime Reporter’s home page, click here.
Health care, not health insurance.
Health insurance gets in the way of people needing health care.
Health insurers get wealthy off of the pain, misery, suffering, and deaths of people needing health care.
Health insurance is a crime.
Fred Block of the Longview Institute wrote an essay entitled “The Thing Economy and the Care Economy” a few years ago that frames this issue very well.
The “thing” economy, says Block, is dedicated to creating wealth. The “care” economy is responsible for using part of that wealth to provide education, health care, care for children/handicapped/aged persons, infrastructure — all the things we need in common and which the “thing” economy needs in order to do its part.
America has correctly identified education as a human right to be provided as a public good to all. It has erred, however, in classifying health care as a profit-making industry, which makes insurers and hospitals and nursing homes responsible NOT to the sick but to those who would make money off their misery.
Dennis Kucinich is not alone in the U.S. Congress when he speaks out for single payer, however. The original author of HR 676 is John Conyers of Michigan. Mr. Kucinich has authored other bills, including a grand one that would have the US pick up the portion of drug research costs that it doesn’t already pay in exchange for new drugs being released as generics that could be produced by drug companies in competition with one another. Many other senators and representatives favor single payer, but have been stymied SO FAR by the influence the insurance and drug company lobbies have to thwart their will and that of the 69 percent of Americans who want it.
Free Health Care. No bills from the doctor or hospital. Think about it. I just had heart failure as nearly half of you men will. My share of the cost, which is absolutely assinine, has put me into poverty. I am working not for my future anymore but to pay off my health care bill.
And I am EXACTLY where MOST of you will be in your future. Whether heart failure, breast cancer, prostate cancer or some other disease. You think you are working toward your retirement? Only in America can so many be rendered to be complete idiots. Your ‘faith’ in your future is a kind of bambi syndrome.
The time to live - the time to secure your future - is now. Not my trying to change the haalth care system, but by utterly replacing it. And that implies replacing those who support it.
Nearly every American’s retirement will be lost to health care costs. Whether in a nursery home or the $500,000 bills from cancer treatment or heart failure. And that is assuming we admit that most can even AFFORD health care. Most of us can’t anymore!
When you get really sick, you eventually lose your job and go on long term disability. And when you lose your job, you lose your health care. Wake UP you idiots. The system works against you to get rid of the inefficient - to get rid of the ‘costs’ to the corporate profit margins.
What you have now WILL be taken away from you. That is the new America as it exists today. We already see that in most every other thing in this country. Most of us will have to go completely without. Our worse, we are intentionally “taken out” with drugs and corrupt health care practices because we are seen as a “cost” to the system. It will be written off as a mistake or an accident or blamed on a disease or complication that you really do or did not have. And how are you going to prove otherwise? They make the diagnosis, they control your medical records.
You don’t think that will happen? Look at the complete lack of integrity of the tobacco companies, corporations just like health care, their executives that stood before Congress with hand held high in giving statements that there is no proven evidence that tobacco causes cancer or is a health risk. Science verses corporate greed - and they defer to their greed. They are willing to kill you to make a profit and make themselves rich.
And the health care system, with the changes to HMOs and insrance company control and dictates in the 1980’s and 1990’s, is today NO DIFFERENT!
Whether it is health care, home ownership, or some other measure, we ARE slaves in this country. And when we are no longer productive, we are cast aside to rot in the hell we have, out of complacency, created for ourselves. There is no worse situation in all of this world. As a Christian, I tend to agree that America has come to represent, through it’s corporatism or creed, nothing less than satanism.
Chavez was absolutely right! I can smell the brimstone too.
Everywhere in this country!
And that cancer is spreading through other nations even now. And the greed in their governments are doing nothing to stop it.
And so it comes down to you. The People. At least our country was right in those early days. We the People have to stand up for what is right, all around the world, and demand a change.
To boycott corporations and corporatism, to force out government officials who support that ‘capitalist’ cancer. To support the products made by your neighbor and small local businesses - even if it costs a little more. Ask any soldier from WWI or WWII. Good change comes at a cost. Good things like freedom are not free. You do not eat and drink once and expect to live forever. It is a state of vigilance and constant maintenance.
For every reader here who would tell me the US is the best country in the world, I say you have stuck you head so far up the corporate elites ass, I think your unsupported pride and arrogance is so blatant, I say you are in such denial that you cannot see beyond the light of it’s sphincter.
I am working right now to get the hell out of this country. Just as Einstein and other scientists did when they left Germany. There is a threshold when you can do no more good from inside the system. And I would suggest others do the same.
I love my country, what it used to be, I love the Constitution of the United States even as it is eroded by this administration and government. I was born and raised in Washington State as was my great grandfather the first federal deputy in the Washington territory - but I say to hell with what our government has become.
If this is the direction of our country, I would rather see it fail. I can serve democracy best by supporting it in other nations of the world.
Whether here at home or abroad, I myself will stand with the rest of the world. As for you George Bush. As for you ‘Dick’ Cheney. As for you all in the GOP - not to mention most in the Republican and even Democratic parties - who are on and vote the corporate payrolls - know this. I am making a list and checking it twice. And I will be neither naughty or nice. But, as an American citizen with a responsibility to see justice done, I will do what HAS to be done and support war crimes brougth against you all in your old age.
Your futures taken away from you. Just as you have taken away from so many of your fellow citizen’s upon whom you see as a means to mistreat in climbing your ladder of ’success’.
Have you ever wondered what is hold that ladder upright? Have you ever been at the top of a ladder when it fell over? Let me give you a clue.
Just as you threaten my future with a health care and corporate systems that will make you rich, I propose to take it all away from you through a court of world law. In your arrogance and pride of what you think the future holds, you will not even see it coming. The whole world is turning against the US and that should tell you something…
there will be NO PLACE to hide!
But like I said, your blood-lust to satisfy your greed has your senses stuck so far up that sphincter as to render your mad-bovine minds to be utterly blind, deaf and dumb. You’re staggering around in your own waste of giddiness and corruption in a self-imposed feedlot while EVERYONE else in the world can smell your stench. Soon, they will corral you and take you inside to the world court to be butchered. And I, as one of your former fellow country men, and millions more like me, will be a member of that jury and will be glad and praise God Almight to see that justice done.
And may God have mercy on your souls - because you will get NONE from me!
Ken Boettger
Ellensburg, WA
Having “someone *else* to pay your healthcare costs” is EXACTLY what a health care system is designed to do and must do, for one simple reason: very few people can afford the care they eventually need (more so in the overpriced US).
That is why it’s not “receive what you pay for” but instead the solidarity system of “everybody contributes via -hopefully!- fair taxes or insurance payments, and those who need services get them. Those who don’t just pay. If that thought - paying while not (yet) receiving - drives you insane, chances are, you have been infected by evil ideology.
The insurance industry has been engaged in criminal behavior for decades. There is nothing wrong with making these misery profiteers criminals. The single payer plan is morally correct and is the only way to keep health care costs from bankrupting the nation.
About MtnGoat’s assertions of the magical powers of the “market”…
One does not need much observation these days to recognize FINALLY and clearly that “market” forces are no panacea for anything. Very often, the people who most extoll the value of the market are the ones who do the most to manipulate it for their own ends.
Have Halliburton, Enron or Exxon made energy cheaper? Are US pharmaceuticals not the highest priced in the world? Does our private sector not take huge somes of public funds to grace a given community with its presence (community “protection” money)? What about industries that exkport more jobs than products?
When the market goes “haywire”, like in the meltdowns of Mexico and the S&L crisis, who pays to create the phony sensation of a return to market equilibrium and maintain the farce? Future generations of Americans, that’s who.
Hey, how about the privatization of Walter Reed, for a recent example?
Put away those notions. Efficiency, expertise, responsibility and caring are neccesary for ANY social effort to succeed. The main way a private group does better than a government one is to reduce what it pays for labor. At least with the government we have the right to oversee it and try to manage and correct it.
Corporate “personhood” was the biggest scam this country has ever seen.
Government agencies run by private sector gurus and lobbyists like we now have is the absolute worst of all worlds. They are champions in corruption and graft (witness the spate of “no-bid” contracts with Iraq and Katrina), with no saving social graces or concerns.
Enron alone gave us an unelected president (oh yes! they were #1 funder of Bush even while they were going under financially) and the reason to occupy Iraq (Enron was gatekeeper to Dick cheney’s secret US Energy Policy meetings — which included divvying up Iraqi oil assets — back in 2000!). BTW, how does a country calling itself a democracy have a secret ‘public’ policy that affects us all??
Health care is the sine qua non of a Public Venture, a shared social cost that benefits every individual as well as the security of the nation as a whole. Oversight, accountability and fair election processes are needed to keep it working for the people.
MtnGoat, have you made any effort to understand other comments? Insurance companies take 31 per cent of every health dollar and provide 0,nada, no services-none at all.
Fine Mtngoat, you can keep your lousy insurance. Your tax dollars can go to fund the war, too. But i’d be happier funding a system that benefits everyone, because we will all get old and/or sick and need care at some point. Corporations couldn’t care less if you get well, they just want a profit. Why else have they convinced us that there are no cures for AIDS or cancer, what a bunch of bull! It’s all a smokescreen designed to keep you asleep at the wheel. Work your ass off for 70 years making someone else rich (the CEO of your company, your bank, your credit card company, your mortgage company, your insurance company) and then they take your hard-earned cash as soon as you can’t be a cog in the machine anymore. Corporate fodder from cradle to grave and you can’t see it. Too bad.
Corporations do not create wealth, they only appropriate it.
MtnGoat: may I assume from your writing that when you turn 65 you will not avail yourself of Medicare since you deem any such health care to be “socialized” and thus apparently beneath you?
correct. I would not consider it ‘beneath’ me, but I do consider the practice morally questionable when the cash is extracted by the means used. I hold no malice for people who profess concern for others, only for the means they sometimes use to pursue it.
Medicare, like SSec, will fall prey to the demographic crunch..and the increasing need to burden the smaller pool of workers paying in at ever higher rates…for benefits they will never see in the same quantity when they retire.
So not only do i not plan not to avail myself of it, I doubt it is smart to count on it continuing. This is the problem with peter pays paul transfer programs..they do not actually build wealth, they just move it about with no surplus creation.
The biggest roadblock to non-profit Universal Heath Care in America is the predominant capitalistic mindset of U.S. citizens that shamelessly denies the common good.
What America must overcome first is the cancerous ideology of American individualism, American exceptionalism and the belief that the rights of capital should dominate all other interests.
How does it deny the common good? It seems to me you have an formulation you prefer which many do not agree with. For example, I see the protection of each person, and their right to their own capital, as the most basic common good..and it applies to every single person. Isn’t something that applies to all, a common good?
The farmer used to care. Agribusiness cares only about profits. The result is an inferior product, water and air pollution, and reduced yield (yes, the family farm produced more and better total food).
I have a difficult time believing human nature in this regard has ever changed. Read back thousands of years and you see the same behaviors, lying, cheating, love, honor, theft, creation, respect, betrayal.
I have a hard time believing farmers used to care but don’t any more, even if they work for agribuisness. I know a bunch of orchardists working for Dole, and they seem to care to me. I don’t understand why the presumption of people working anywhere is so negative.
As always, there is an open, non coercive way to deal with your concerns…simply refuse to buy from them. Corporate farms have no power to make you change your mind or your actions. When enough people agree, you’ll have your change…all by open, consensual, non threatening means.
All insurance/risk management schemes are fraud. They are effectively a poor-person tax.
Poor people are considered risky, and have to pay more car insurance because they live in high-risk neighborhoods. Poor people have to pay a higher loan interest. Where ever a person’s resources are small, or their vulnerability (need) is great, there come the credit companies and the insurance companies to prey upon them.
This is why the credit companies and insurance companies are the biggest contributors to the republican machine, because they are “trickle-down” economics in action: The poor get poorer. (as trickle-down punishment and incentive)
Did you know that if you are rich enough to put $30,000 in escrow, you do not need insurance?
poor people *are* actuarially risky. is someone taking a higher risk for loaning their capital just supposed to eat the increased risk of doing so? should the rest of us pay higher premiums to cover behaviors we neither choose nor control?
I take great care to pay my bills and honor my commitments, I can see no reason why all my effort and planning should be for naught because of someone elses choices I do not control.
i suppose you could end the predation by banning loans to the poor so they are not preyed upon.
Single payer, everyone covered, period. As it is there is a crazy quilt of coverage, overlapping in some areas, black holes in others. How is it that someone who is on Medicare, with supplemental medicaid, and a Medicare drug plan, enters hospice care (in home), and suddenly hospice is paying for medications? Why doesn’t the Medicare drug plan insurance company continue to cover the cost (up to the donut hole) and then medicaid cover the patient portion? It looks to me like 2 1/2 layers of coverage which allows the insurance company off the hook when hospice begins to provide services. The insurance company is a private for-profit concern that has now had its bottom line improved because their cost has just been covered by hospice (probably federal $). Meanwhile, someone, patient or medicare, has paid the premium for the year — does the insurance company refund this to the government or the subscriber? I seriously doubt it. The health”care” system in this country is a byzantine labyrinth. If the disease doesn’t kill you, trying to negotiate the bureaucracy might.
Yep,
Private universal health care is basically a forced subsidy of the insurance industry (see my comments above), which is championed by so many on the right. They are even eager for it.
Single payer is better. Edwards, Hillary, and Obama are against single-payer, but they do support various corporate welfare plans.
None of the declared Presidential candidates with the exception of Kucinich is supporting single-payer.
MtnTroll,
Are you willing to work as hard as the poorest do? Divine justice says that you will. But they will have their day: when promises of future value such as currency, stocks and bonds are not guaranteed by wealth but by labor. And the largest of unions will short the largest of central banks, and win.
You say it is their “bad behavior” which makes them unattractive to the investors? Are you comfortable in your condemnation? I say that attractiveness to them is overrated, and that it is the bad behavior of the moneychangers which harms the poor.
You will see the risk game played out on a large scale with Basel II very soon, and a global “run on the banks”. What will you eat then?
I too can see no reason why all your effort and planning should be for naught because of someone elses choices you do not control.
It is sad how some people can continue to miss my point about the common good. Those who reject free health care for all reflect a serious crisis of the human spirit in America.
Because of our love for money, how we worship financial success, America has become a selfish self-centered nation. As a nation, it seems we are no longer capable of thinking great thoughts. Our materialistic culture has suppressed the intrinsic spiritual nature of our humanity.
As a corporate imperialistic nation, we are the prime cause of much of the world’s problems. The American Empire has essentially created a war between the forces of materialism and the forces spirituality. One of the great insuppressible forces of spirituality is a deep hunger for justice.
It is a matter of evolutionary maturity of our human species that the forces of spirituality prevail. It is time we mature as a nation and go to work creating a more just, sustainable and compassionate world.
A major first step would be the compassion to legislate universal health care for all.
Universal health care would be great, but expanding our current medical (sickness) system to provide more coverage to more people won’t produce more health.
Oh yes, MtnGoat! Protection of each person’s capital! Yes, yes indeed–taxation is a crime!
Have you ever stopped to realize that it really is not “your capital”? You use public infrastructure and facilities, and benefit from the work of public employees. And even more than that, the only reason you have a job at all, or are able to invest, is because the government and the society that surrounds it exists to establish the economic and legal framework that makes it all possible.
This is so conveniently forgotten by you arrogant “I’ve got mine–you’re on your own!” types. But it makes me smile to realize that it’s very possible that you, too, will feel the sting of want. Your job can go bye-bye too. Your economic well-being is not assured, no matter what your “Shucks, I’ll pull myself up from mah bootstraps!” bullshit claims.
I won’t even bother pointing out how much less economic overhead the Medicare system has than the rapacious, evil private health insurance industry. You can look that up on your own–not that you will.
You either believe that human beings have a right to essentials like health care, or you don’t.
Do you mind giving up your hard-earned capital to fund war, or corporate welfare, or paying huge amounts of unearned interest to the privately-owned Federal Reserve?
And let me guess… There’s nothing at all wrong with CEOs making hundreds of times what the lowest-paid worker does, because dammit, they deserve it. If those peons don’t like it, they can go start their own multinational corporations!
And if corporations send as many jobs overseas as possible, then pay next to no tariffs to import their shit back here and sell it to the same people they took the jobs away from, well that’s the beauty of the free market! Let’s all hear it for laissez faire economics! If you don’t like it, dammit, start your own country, your own corporations, and your own shipping system. Stop whining!
What’s that? Your child’s lunch box has lead in it? What’s the problem? Sure, a government agency could prevent that sort of thing, but that kind of government agency not only costs money–MY damned money, mind you–it’s illegal. Yesirree, it’s illegal and immoral for the government to prevent corporations from harming people for profit. You don’t like it? Earn a Ph.D. in analytical chemistry, set up your own testing labs, hire your own staff, and do your own product testing! Damned whiners!
No, the system is not designed to consolidate wealth among the few, and keep the have-nots marginalized. No, dammit, it’s not! Because I said so! Hand out of my wallet!
How anyone can be a right-winger or Libertarian past the age of 25 is a mystery to me. Grow the hell up.
One closing thought, if I may. About 18,000 people in the US die each year for want of health insurance. For you to whine and bitch about a small amount of money in taxes being taken from you to prevent this–and let’s face it, it would truly be a small amount, if indeed it was any more than currently being taken–is downright evil.
But you sure don’t mind using public services when they suit you, do you? Or if you lost your job, would you not use the unemployment office? Do you not drive on public roads? Do you not benefit from the protection provided by our military and police?
Oh, I know–that’s all different. We all need police. And you have private health insurance. The people who don’t have health insurance are shit out of luck. And even though some wealthy people have private protective services… Hey wait, never mind.
I’d like to repeat the following statement from TeaParty which resonated for me more then all the other arguments on this forum combined:
> About 18,000 people in the US die each year for want of health insurance.
These are our fellow americans. We are the richest country in the world. It is within our means to eliminate this statistic. Not doing so is morally reprehensible.
This is such a crock. The purist “leap to single-payer immediately approach” is a recipe for deadlock, even without considering how Stalinist “outlaw private health insurance” sounds to the average American who has been propagandized for a century to fear anything that sounds vaguely socialist.
If we think single payer is superior, and it is, then why fear a competitive regime where privates have to compete with Medicare for All? I know that me and about 100 million ohers will immediately switch to Medicare for all, and its low overhead means that it will be able to pay higher reimbursements to providers while charging lower rates (or collections via taxes) than private insurers can.
I hate to break it to anyone, but Kucinich is not going to be president. Edwards very well might, and his plan will lead to single payer in my lifetime (and I’m on the downslope), whereas the all or nothing approach will not get us any closer to single payer in a century.
that’s the kind of compromise I could live with JMG. as you say there are plenty of people who would switch, and you’d be able to choose to cover everyone who wanted it…just as it is stated as a goal anyway. Assuming the accounting is kept separate and payments made only by those enrolled, and any existing direct subsidies of private care are ended to ensure neither competitor is getting state money instead of subscriber money, it offers the ability of all to take their pick…and no reason to oppose doing so.