The Market Made Me Do It: Health Insurance That Disappears When You Need It
Health Net, one of California’s largest health insurers, saved $35.5 million in medical expenditures for people that needed life-saving care. They did it the easy way - they just stopped paying; ejecting the sick from their health plans.
Health Net says that they are just catching fraud. The law allows insurers to deny covering people with pre-existing conditions and Health Net claims that those they cut off - in some cases cancer patients in the middle of critical treatment - are simply those that failed to disclose their conditions when enrolling in their system. It almost makes you want to give them the benefit of the doubt, since of course it’s really the competitive system they have to live within. It’s not their fault that the rules and laws allow discrimination and segregation of the sick. You know “the market made me do it.”
Never mind that the health insurance industry has consistently fought to allow the pre-existing condition exclusion in the law. The insurers are well heeled and potent political players and have so-far succeeded. For example, California health insurers spent more than $1 million in lobbying in just the first 90 days of 2004. Health Net alone spent $2.7 million in Federal campaign contributions and Federal lobbying expenses between 1997 and 2004.
On one level, the insurers are right. The current system, regardless of their role in keeping it that way, allows for (and may even depend on) such criminal denial of care to those that need it most. It’s straight-up American-style health rationing — you don’t get care if you can’t afford to pay or if you’re too sick and expensive to cover. It makes you wonder just how many more than the 47 million uninsured that currently have insurance are really underinsured (i.e. not covered for what they need most) or provisionally insured (i.e. insured until they need it.)
But the benefit of the doubt evaporates and becomes outraged blame with the discovery that Health Net set cancellation goals and was giving bonuses to staff based on the number of people whose policies were revoked. One Health Net analyst was given more than $20,000 in bonuses by revoking over 1600 insurance policies and saving millions for the insurer. Never mind the irony of a health care company that rewards the denial of needed medical services. That’s the market working in health care -sell insurance plans and collect premiums until the policy holder gets cancer, has a heart attack, or any other expensive disease.
American economic ideology today is dominated by new kinds of religious fundamentalists. Not those that believe in a supreme being, but those that profess religious, almost fanatical, belief in the unregulated “market” as the ultimate provider of all things good. “Supply and demand” is the supreme directive. Profitability and stock prices are the alter that determines virtue or sin.
And they promote so-called “market mechanisms” as the only way to ensure high quality outcomes. “Market mechanism” is the benign-sounding term that implies that only financial gain and competition produce the outcomes we want. In this case, ‘market mechanism’ is just another term for the perverse financial incentives Health Net used to make sure their “cancellation department” was squeezing every unprofitable policy holder out of the system. And, in pure market terms the sick are just an unrecoverable cost for which there are only two responses - heal the patient or eject the patient. The “Market” says heal if it’s cheap enough and eject if cuts into the bottom line.
This isn’t an indictment of all markets - they can bring new-fangled cell phones to consumers, give people choices about what kinds of clothing to buy and helps encourage producers to innovate and continually improve service and sometimes keep prices in check.
There are simply areas in which the market stunningly fails to live up to the pronouncements of the “market fundamentalists.” The unregulated market is simply unable to provide public goods that require universal, equal access.
Health care presents the classic case where the market fails and where we need other mechanisms to meet our public needs. America’s market based system of health care relies on people to have enough money (individually or through their job) to pay for insurance. Only Medicare, a primarily tax-financed system takes ability to pay out of the equation and gives every American over 65 equal access to medical care. The result for those under 65 years of age: 47 million uninsured, millions more underinsured and if Health Net’s revocation bonuses become the norm, then millions more with health care that disappears when you need it.
Donald Cohen is the Executive Director of the Center on Policy Initiatives (www.onlinecpi.org) a San Diego-based research and policy center. Cohen has over 25 years of experience in campaigns and organizations dedicated to economic justice, healthcare reform, education reform, environmental protection, and international human rights.
We need to introduce these phrases into public discourse: “market rationing”, “market failure” and “cost dumping”, all of which apply here. The latter two apply nicely to environmental problems and unsafe working conditions.
Why should we who are diligent and sensible pay for other people’s deliberately risky behavior? Lung cancer comes from smoking, bowel cancer comes from eating fatty foods and brain cancer comes from watching too much television and spending too much time on Commondreams.org.
Seriously, we need to introduce these phrases into public discourse: “market rationing”, “market failure” and “cost dumping”, all of which apply here. The latter two apply nicely to environmental problems and unsafe working conditions.
As opposed to public goods that do not require universal, equal access, one assumes.
The underlying assumption seems to be that profitability for corporate entities with no accountability to anyone but shareholders (and that is often questionable) is somehow preferable to public funding of essential services.
I admit that it’s increasing difficult to distinguish between the US government and its corporate sponsorship. Both appear more and more driven by the profit motive for themselves, but how that adds any value to the services provided by either is beyond me.
The underlying assumption also hinges on a clean market-only rationale to explain how the wealthy came into their wealth/status/opportunity. If it was largely inherited or won through warfare, then it wasn’t a “market” which got them there. It was the age-old caste/royalty/feudal system.
You cannot ice that cake with free-market ideology and expect it to taste like cake.
Blessed with good health, I have never wanted or been entitled to any health insurance, and have never, ever, not once, cost anybody one single penny for any health care I’ve received—paid it myself when I needed it and that’s the way I want it. But I live in Massachusetts, where Romney’s bid for the presidency made him ramp up a compulsory health care system—the state telling me what I am “required” to buy whether I need it or not. (If I don’t buy I’ll pay tax penalties that get worse fast.) I can tell you only nightmares and insults from the “health industry” to my family and friends across all our lives. And reading this article I am the more sure that the first time I really need this Insurance Scam it will desert me in the blink of an eye….All because business-lobby parasites bribed my state government (not a difficult thing to do)….Does anybody think health care is going to improve this way? Is it going to get cheaper? Will the emergency room wait be shorter? Fuck, no—but Mitt the Twit Romney, the Stormin’ Mormon, is already claiming to have “fixed” Mass. health care….What will be “required buying” next? Why not cancel the car inspection system and make everybody buy a new Ford every 2 years? Good for the economy, it’s only bad for your economy! As usual…
As a professional in the healthcare industry, I am continually appalled by all the profit that is obtained by causing so much grief and hardship. Everyone who gets a bonus by denying care should be forced to follow these
sick people to know their outcome from such a denial. That is one of the main reasons I thin everyone should be able to purchase a medical insurance policy from the government [as just one choice among many]. I, for one, would choose Medicare and Medicade as a medical plan due to the reasonableness of the fees, the vast coverage and the known coverage terms. The private carriers just don’t care, except for the profits. But unfortunately this is the system we have and until the “leadership” in the government changes, I doubt life and medicare will improve for anyone.
The article talks about those under 65. Seniors also have problems.
My older sister (She is 76; I’m 71.) had a stroke last winter. She spent 6-7 weeks in rehab relearning how to swallow, talk, and walk. According to the Medicare booklet, they pay for 100 days of rehab. No. That’s not what it means. They say that they are supposed to pay for the first 21 days. After that, the “pay” they talk about is only partial pay. Also, this includes only the stay in the rehab facility. It doesn’t include the various therapies. She also had what she thought for good supplemental insurance. It wasn’t. She ended up paying between $2000 and $3000 dollars. Moreover, Medicare only paid for the first 14 days of rehab. They lost a week somewhere. She’s still trying to straighten it out.
I have the same type of supplemental as she does. It cost me over $2000 a year. I’ve tried to get information on what would happen if I end up in rehab. All I get is a lenghty discussion of their drug benefits. I don’t take any drugs. I eat organic, take supplements, and try to stay healthy on my own. I couldn’t get a clear answer from them.
Under 65 or over, it’s still a scam.
WHAT COMPETITION?
Imagine a thousand individuals who contribute $100/month to an insurance fund that grows at $100,000 a month.
Assume they agree to fund X health services for Y dollars consumed by Z members. If the fund declines, they either raise the contributions or reduce the services and vice versa.
Under effective competition, there could be hundreds of such funds, designed to insure for a wide variety of services.
But the Catch-22 is that some funds would be very expensive for the very sick and vice versa. Healthy folks would like this and the sick would not.
In the extreme, pure, private competition would diverge to no insurance at all - one just ends up paying directly for each service, including those for catastrophic illness which insurance is supposed to diffuse in the first place.
The opposite of this is Single Payer, which spreads the risk across the largest group, covers everyone and acts to offset the massive market power and manipulation in the private health care industry.
Free market crowds go apoplectic on single payer for several reasons: It doesn’t match consumers directly with prices that reflect the cost of their consumption and can cause over consumption. In reverse, it can limit what services are available due to controls on price, terms and conditions.
So what? The irony is that the SAME problems exist with the current private system. It’s nowhere near a standard of “effective competition”, whether in the form of large numbers of small group plans or small numbers of large group plans - all designed to spread risk.
Instead, the current system treats disease instead of prevention, jerks customers around between sign-up limits and available, overpriced drugs on formulary lists and is saturated with fraud and corruption on the private and government side.
Insurers that take in revenues on one side and disqualify payouts on the other are just adding insult to injury. As the private system deteriorates futher, Single Payer keeps looking better.
It’s like Paul Krugman says, free-market conservatives can’t stand it when government does it better, especially when they’re the ones making it more attractive every day.
I agree with everyone here. The Insurance industry has been completely corrupted. So DUMP it!
Is there a way, a group, a mindset, a will to start up a truly NON PROFIT health insurance company? Are there enough people with economic know-how and drive to set up a NEW health insurance company that REALLY IS based on one idea: paying for people to have good health care? Can an organization do this without going broke, making enough money to continue operation?
This NOT the perfect solution, I understand. It would be nice if we all (as a nation) were of a mindset where we believed in taking care of each other. But using the system that we have, can we simply divert our energies and resources from those who would deny us services and create our own organization that actually does service us? Something along the lines of Cesar Chavez and his use of the boycott?
I would LOVE some feedback from people, either saying why this won’t work, or information on how this could be done, or any other perspective you may have.
Thanks.
JS
(Up to this point I have not been an adequate student of history or philosophy. Thus I profusely apologize for any mutilation or simplification of ideas I may do in my writing. Before any flames come my way, I’ll just say I’m working on improving those fields of knowledge.)
The current “for profit sick care system” is broken and needs to be replaced. It is just one more manifestation of soul-absent capital worship. It has nothing to reccommend it and nothing to justify its continuation except for the very few who reap the profits.
Divide and conquor works so well to perpetuate this horror. Those deemed unworthy who do not follow the healthy living trends, somehow deserve??? to be cut off—they are costing all of us. The addicted, the obese, are us,folks, and we are them. Get a clue. There is no “other” and the later we realize this and start making sure we all have access to what we need to survive and hopefully thrive, the sicker we will become. SICKO is the perfect title for Michael Moore’s movie.
Finally, no matter what it will cost, there are plenty of financial resources to pay for a true health care system. We must stop buying in to the “scarcity” myth of limitation. It’s where we place our priorities, which is where where we place our values.
Taking the profit motive out creates an opening for creative health enhancing solutions that are so much less expensive than the current practice of dealing with disease—- Cut, Burn and Poison. There is a reason why so many research breakthroughs come from Europe, and so many are natural and inexpensive. Take profit out and nothing of value is surpressed to reduce competition.
Private medical insurance is like the Mafia. As long as you can pay the loan sharks, and the protection money, you are safe. But once the victim is no longer a rich picking, and most people are not these days, there is likely to be a debt collection, a beat up, and a toss out on to the sick scrap pile. Its just a business, not a community service.
The private insurance system is going to collapse along with the rest of the economy. Health insurance will be a recourse only to the very rich. Hospitals and the medical systems are going to go out of business, or break down under the load without adequate funding, as the US dollar dives.
Our Father who art the Economy, Hallowed be thy Name. Thy Kingdom come, thy Will be done, on earth as it is on Wall Street. Let us give You this day our daily bread and we forgive You Your Creative Destruction as You forgive us our credit card debits. Lead us into the Mall but deliver us from bankruptcy, for Thine is the Country Club, the Stock Market and the Green Back forever and ever. In the name of the Economy, the Market, and the Invisible Hand. Amen.
As actuarial science becomes more perfect, insurance as such will destroy itself. Health insurance, anyway. Just suppose that it was possible to know - for sure - whether or not any given person would become sick in the next 5 or 10 years. Those who will could not get insurance, and those who will not would not want it.
To Joaquins:
There already IS a non-profit medical insurance system that functions well and keeps its overhead costs down in the 2%-3% range (as opposed to profit-making HMOs with overheads of 25-30%!). It’s a single-payer system. It’s Medicare.
Presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich wants to expand it to cover ALL citizens and legal residents. SO DO I. Eliminating all for-profit “health” insurance companies would produce huge savings in overhead costs, making it possible to improve Medicare: we could add vision and dental care, prescription drug coverage in which Medicare would negotiate the prices with the drug companies, and eliminate all deductibles and co-pays for people below a certain level of income. We could also raise the reimbursement rates for doctors and hospitals, which are lagging behind inflation.
This would also make possible the demise of Medicaid — why do we need TWO national medical care systems, with different rules and regulations? What a waste of our tax dollars!
S I N G L E - P A Y E R !
As stated by a previous poster, the health insurance system in the U.S. is just “business”, the same as everything else in the U.S. On May 2, 2007, the CDC published their report which stated that the birth/death ratio per 1000 in the U.S. for the year 2004 was 6.78 infant deaths. In Cuba the rate is currently 5.3 infant deaths per 1000 live births, despite Cuba being criminally blockaded by the U.S. for nearly half a century. This statistic is more representative as an indicator of a healthcare system than longevity indicators because the low birth/death ratio is a result of prenatal care, something that all Cuban women have full access to, for free, with no hidden costs.
Eventually, all countries in the world are going to have to model their healthcare systems on the Cuban healthcare system, because it is the first comprehensive healthcare system in the world and every other country in the world will always be trying to catch up to the Cubans in quality healthcare. Forever.
“But the benefit of the doubt evaporates and becomes outraged blame with the discovery that Health Net set cancellation goals and was giving bonuses to staff based on the number of people whose policies were revoked.”
Wow! If Senator Lantos called the Yahoos pygmies, what the hell is he going call these dirtbags?
joaquins said: “Is there a way, a group, a mindset, a will to start up a truly NON PROFIT health insurance company? Are there enough people with economic know-how and drive to set up a NEW health insurance company that REALLY IS based on one idea: paying for people to have good health care? Can an organization do this without going broke, making enough money to continue operation?”
Perhaps Canada’s healthcare system could offer healthcare to ALL American’s below the age of 40. As someone over 40, I’d be bummed out. But it would at least put the knife into the free-marketeers: that what they are really doing is overcharging the young to deny service to the old. I would rather my children be charged and serviced than, like I, be overcharged and denied. And the current American system is designed to do precisely that. Such a system would at least eventually put the American hyena’s (literally feasting on the carcasses of the baby-boomers) out of business, rather than ensnaring more of the young into what is essentially generational warfare.
The Canadian healthcare system is vastly overrated and is currently undergoing changes to increase the amount of privatization in order to emulate the U.S. healthcare system.
Another race to the bottom.
There were articles recently that the British govt. is failing to reimburse dentists adequately, so many of them won’t see new patients. Stories of people pulling their own teeth, repairing crowns with super glue, etc.
The situation for the average person in the West, in general, is on the decline.
jmacneil: Oh puuulleeeeze, not that old saw again! The Canadian system has issues, the US system is an UTTER CATASTROPHE! We pay more for less health care than any country in the world. You are clinging to ideology over evidence.
The test of any ethical bargain is this: would you accept either side of it? People who argue against universal health care are: wealthy; not currently sick, nor paying large amounts of money for someone else’s care; political hacks.
We’ve wasted TRILLIONS of dollars on this in the last fifty years, it’s time to try a new approach. Doctors and dentists who game the system (many do not), pharmaceutical companies and their sales reps, insurers… suck it up, you had your fun. Few are believing the self-serving lies anymore.
jmacneil says: The Canadian healthcare system is vastly overrated and is currently undergoing changes to increase the amount of privatization in order to emulate the U.S. healthcare system.
I find it hard to believe that the Canadians would want a system like ours that has 47 million people without any insurance and as this article points out, we don’t know how many have lost coverage when they needed it most.
Maybe there is something in between the Canadian system and health care for profit?
This country needs a revolution for these types of injustices to disappear.
The sad fact is that there’s enough money out there to cover everybody. Remember the Ponzi scheme? This is similar: people fork over cash to insurance companies with the belief that the aggregate funding produced will be there to help individuals. It’s all perfectly logical. The way it gets turned into a quasi-Ponzi scheme is that the insurance companies can’t sit so close to a mountain of cash and resist the temptation to dole it out amongst themselves.
Then, the idea of covering expensive medical treatments is viewed as taking a bite out of “their” money, so greed drives them to exclude and deny and drop and lobby.
The only rectification to the original logical operation of insurance is to codify the funds as “public” through nationalized health care. Even then, we’ve only got another wasteful and greedy set of people managing it, but once it’s out of private hands and into public coffers it’d be a lot easier to keep things from getting too out of hand. It’s not like there aren’t any successful implementations of national health insurance that the U.S. can’t learn from…
jmacneil November 11th, 2007 7:19 pm
“The Canadian healthcare system is vastly overrated and is currently undergoing changes to increase the amount of privatization in order to emulate the U.S. healthcare system.”
After reading this article, wouldn’t you agree that the U.S. Health Care System is also overrated? Have you ever considered that the “Partnership” Bush wants to create with Canada and Mexico might have something to do with Canada undergoing changes in their health care system? One thing most politicians in this country don’t want is socialized medicine! An open borders partnership with Canada and its socialized health program would create problems for the “unholy” alliance.
It’s not a matter of want, it’s a matter of market oriented to the system imposed by those who seek excessive and illegitimate profit.
The governmental system in Canada is hardly different than that which runs the U.S. It’s only a matter of scale. For instance, when Brian Mulroony was prime minister of Canada he was more than willing to sell the country down the toilet so that he could dance on the world stage with that dementia Ronald Raygun. Now, it is being investigated that the former Prime Minister Mulroony accepted bribes in the amounts of hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash for influencing the awarding of contracts to Airbus. Of course, it is stupid to think that the only crimes he committed are those to which he was implicated in. It is always the case that criminals get away with many before they slip up and get caught for one.
The Massachussets model is NOT the one to go by.
btw… Hillary has already proposed her solution. another 110-150 billion dollar handout to the health insurance for profit corperations (the one’s who fund her campaign).
I once lived in an old warehouse with a front door that opened into a small very run down trailer park. The residents were almost as stereotypical as you can imagine, sad alchoholics, meth heads, down on their luck. One time, a guy came through in his van. He made teeth. Partials and bridges and such. You should have seen the happy recipients of some $70 snap in teeth. What we need is for more professionals to drop out of the current system and really start serving people again. Like the outlaw plumber character Robert DeNero played in the movie Brazil.
Everybody who proposes “reform” of the health care system just seems to be trying to come up with another way to feed the monster, and it keeps getting bigger and bigger. The problem is not just the insurance companies, it is the entire profit driven system all the way from one end to the other.
The US health care system is positively incurable because of ‘Preexisting condition exclusions’. What good is a system that denies care for those who need it most? It’s sick! An HMO’s prime legal duty is to make money, and the only path to profit is by limiting insurance to healthy people and by keeping those with ‘conditions’ out. Universal healthcare, by contrast, devotes all of its funds to care for everybody, and keeps paperwork to a minimum. Medicare overhead costs are 2-3%, as compared to HMOs which syphon off 10% to 30%! The HMOs are the true bureaucratic monsters.
10.54
Duh!
The edit function on this site sucks!
The previous comment of mine should have read,
“10.54
Duh!”
such as I would post to any scumbag who would utilize a progressive site to proselytize their moronic disturbances.
“If they would rather die,” said Scrooge, “they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population…”
Bottom line for the so-called health industry: make a killing, um, I mean a profit.
Bottom line for humanity: health care is a human right.
Paul Krugman, I believe, pointed out on CNBC a few days ago that most Americans don’t know that Medicare and Medicaid already pay half of the dollars used in medical claim payments. We’re half-way to single payer!
The first thing to do from here is stop the backwards trend to privatization of what we’ve already achieved. This is done by electing Democrats as far as the eye can see in Congress and The White House, in 2008, to deprive Republicans a forum for their style of “savings account” health care reform.
Joaquins mentioned above the need to have a non-profit health insurance company. If you’re in Washington or Idaho, check out Group Health Cooperative (ghc.org). As its name suggests, it is consumer-governed and non-profit. My family had this for awhile when I was a kid, and I remember the coverage being quite good, though we were fortunate to just need routine care and prescriptions. Are there other organizations like this elsewhere?
Why shouldn’t health insurance disappear just when you need it? Aren’t our constitutional safeguards also exiting stage right?
So-called ‘Free-Market Capitalism’ does address some public/societal-needs better than any-other approach or System. “Socialistic Single-Payer’ addresses others, most-properly. A country which can identify and Regulate (or ‘not-Regulate’, depending upon appropriateness) ‘which is which’ is successful and meets the Needs of its citizens…
Sweden comes to mind (disclaimer — I admit being of Swedish-descent…).
In the US, Public health-care and Public education are two fine-examples of Needs best-met by a Single-Payer approach.
It is only the Greedy (and those who have bought-in to their propaganda) who push for the ideological-’Purity’ of Privatization-of-Everything.
The NewDeal, and the tide of changes that accompanied-it — which made America the much-touted ‘fine place to live’ that it was (pre-Reagan, at-least) — was not some kind of ‘Gift’ or Largess from FDR&’fellow-travelers’. All of these ‘Commons’ and Regulations (now under-attack or foregone-conclusions due to Corporate/’Interest’-lobbying) were the ‘costs’ and Bribe from those wealthy-Interests in the US that prevented the American-public of that time from joining-in the world-wide/emergent Socialist-revolutions. The ensuing Standards-of-Living and rise of the so-called ‘middle-class’ were always, ALWAYS intended as ‘temporary-impediments’ — to be withdrawn when possible, and when the American ‘Public’ could be maneuvered into allowing-such without effective Protest or backlash.
That ‘time’, obviously, ‘came’ in the mid-1980’s…
A country’s Economic-system does not need to be its sole State-Religion. The US-Public can pick-and-choose (and Historically, HAS) its internal Policies and Nature — as appropriate and effective for its given-Needs. Those who say-otherwise, and argue for such as ‘Purists’, should be ’suspect’ as to their real-Interests.
It is Balance that is being-lost…and only the Public ‘pays the price’ for this, or can effect any change to counter-the-trend. If it does not, then ‘On your head’s be-it’.
There can ultimately be no such thing as a free-market health care system. In order for that to genuinely come about we’d have to completely deregulate the drug industry and medical professions. Namely,
* All drugs would have to be available “over the counter”, so they’d be subject to a genuine free-market supply-demand dynamic. This would include everything from AIDS cocktails, chemo therapy drugs, antibiotics, anesthetics, valium, the whole works. No drug patents either, since these are racket/monopolies guaranteed/enforced by government.
* Anyone should be able to practice medicine if he so desires. Surgery, quackery, whatever. No regulation on who may practice medicine, since regulation is a government function — again, backed ultimately by violence — not a market function. That is, the government will jail/fine people who practice medicine without the proper license.
So now that we have barbituates, etc. legally available to the masses, and anyone may practice any sort of medicine he wants…
Consumer-driven health care, eh?
Just like buying a computer or car. If you buy it and aren’t happy, return it. Get your money back, let “the market” weed out the good products from the bad.
Same with free-market medicine. If a quack kills you, demand your money back and see a better doctor. Oh wait a minute, you don’t get a second chance…
Compassionate health care includes preventative health care, which means helping people break unhealthy addictions, but not penalizing them for their failure to do so. Instead the promoters of ill-health should be taxed for the extra costs. I’m not talking about cigarettes here, but the profits of tobacco companies, for example. If they were to go out of business, would that really be such a bad thing?
Health care cannot be compassionate as long as it remains a for-profit business because then profits will always come before the well-being of people. It this 400 pound Gorilla in the room no one wants to see? What few seem to realize is that this attitude permeates every fiber of American Idealism, where EVERYTHING is for sale, or conducted on a for-profit basis. It’s also why socialism has become such a dirty word.
Who believes in the wonders of a jungle run by powerful predators, i.e. “the market”? The tigers do, of course. And thank goodness their loud roars drown out the other voices.
Today’s CounterPunch includes an article written by Vicente Navarro (Professor of Health and Public Policy at the Johns Hopkins University) entitiled Why Hillary’s Health Care Plan Really Failed. Brief excerpt:
I would quibble with Professor Navarro only inasmuch as he seems to regard the insurance companies as merely an addendum to “we the people.” In truth, “corporate persons” have become “the people.” Both as sponsors and as prime movers and screeners in the candidate selection process, they are the only ones who actually matter to the “people’s representatives” in today’s “greatest democracy on earth.”
My sister was murdered this way. She went for an operation and they discovered it was cancer. The next day her employer yanked her insurance, fired her and told her that Cobra wouldn’t apply because they weren’t paying.
She lived 18 months. Her estate’s lawyers settled with the thieves for medical costs, so essentially the thieves broke even.
“One Health Net analyst was given more than $20,000 in bonuses by revoking over 1600 insurance policies and saving millions for the insurer.”
Though my proposed solution won’t be much to alleviate the structural side of this problem, it might cut down on the number of “analysts” willing to fuck 1600 people over for a bonus. Simply find out where these “analysts” live and repay them for their troubles in good ole PRC fashion: the .22 to the back of the head.
Seriously. How much of this shit do we take until we storm the Bastille?
You know, discussions about our health care system - or lack of one - always amazes me. It always turns into a debate over money, economic theory, “market” theory, Canada’s system, etc. This is really very simple. A decent, evolved society looks after its own - be it health care, elder care, firefighting, police protection - because it’s the right thing to do. Period. We are - and should be proud to be - our brothers keepers.
Those that need ask why will never understand the answer. Well, at least until THEY are rejected by their “insurance” company and find themselves financially destroyed and unable to provide for their spouse or children.
It’s a very cruel way to learn something so simple.
rustyyb—I’m with you. It really boils down to what sort of society we are, but how can we expect people to get back to that basic question when so much shit in the form of lies and distortions and fear mongering is always being piled on top of them. An good lot of peole just like us in other countries have come up with an all inclusive answer. So what is it about the USA citizens that make us so different? Not sure, just asking. I want to believe it’s deliberately created confusion.
It’s all been said. It’s in SiCKO. When health care is delivered through a for-profit institution (insurance companies) there is no incentive to provide the best care to the most people. It can only be about collecting maximum premiums while limiting pay outs (losses) to policy holders. It’s simple, it’s business, and it’s wrong.
How to remove insurance companies and their K-Street agents? Now that is a monumental question. It is right up there with dismantling the military/industrial/congressional/media complex.
rustyb–that’s the way it is with many topics. The media and social conditioning determine the parameters of the discussion. The last thing the scoundrels and weasels want you to do is look at the bigger picture.
And let us not forget it’s all about PRIORITIES… when we compare the $ hemorrhaged into this nonsensical, yet tragic war, the amounts thrown at the military to build ineffective missile systems or planes that will become effete in 10 years “necessitating” the next round of revisions… THAT $ would be better spent on caring for human lives, rebuilding US infrastructure, subsidizing education so that new leaders of tomorrow might emerge, etc. This society has been propagandized into a worship of the oily muscle, of war and weapons, of force-first (what I term “Mars rules”) and as a result is literally bearing witness to its own deterioration on so many scales as a result.
The US, for all its prosperity, its “God shed his grace on thee” has squandered the Divine gift on investing in the ways and means to predation of others. Karma is an equal opportunity employer and has hit our nation through floods, tornadoes, fires, income disparities and losses, Katrina, droughts, etc.
The King (leadership) and the land (how nature responds) are one! No society can long be allowed its comfort zone when its claim to same involves the premeditated MURDER (Iraq at the moment, others in our historical record) of others!
I think it’s extremely important to distinguish between standard of living and quality of life. The free-market system does an excellent job in the standard of living department, but is an abject failure when it comes to delivering quality of life improvements, like clean water, clean air, good law enforcement, a fair justice system, good universal education, and good universal healthcare.