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10.05.09 - 4:37 PM
Reaping and Sowing
Having spent months pressuring employees to lobby against healthcare reform, big insurer WellPoint Inc., which includes Anthem Blue Cross, announced last week it was cutting employee health benefits as well as dismissing some workers. A House investigation earlier this year also found that Wellpoint rewarded employees for finding ways to drop policyholders who developed expensive conditions - raising the morally complex issue of whether those employees are now getting what they deserve, or what.
"Your cost per paycheck will probably increase." - WellPoint memo to its 42,000 employees.
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Show AllAh, the rewards of being a corporate drone.
What goes around comes around.
Does my heart good to see corporate drones taste the wrath of karma...
I'm not so hard hearted. They had to work to get health care. If they didn't do what their employer demanded they'd be fired without so much as a good reference for their next job. It's the executives who are benefiting the most from the health care scam, and damning the drones doesn't hurt those exec's. Even if the drones are the evil fuks who find ways to deny care to others (although, somehow, I think the ones who get let go would be the ones who weren't very good at finding those whom they can deny care).
Re: your last line - Now you're beginning to see how the industry works...
I know how the industry works because so many other forms of business operate in the exact same manner. If you work for a company that has more than 100 employees you're a virtual slave to that company. They'll ask you to piss in a bottle to prove you're not on 'drugs'. They'll try to find out if you vote for the 'wrong' political party. They'll do their best to make sure that you always spout the company line, in the same way that in the former USSR the political commissars (sp?) tried to enforce 'communist' orthodoxy. A corporation is a despotic form of local government, we have no say in them, heck their shareholders have little say in what they do either...
It sounds like what your saying is that what they were doing was OK because they were just following orders.
Read my above post, it's not 'ok'. But it's not like they're more culpable than those who gave them the orders. Those who would (and did) fire them when it was profitable. Why damn those who are trying to survive, and not damn the sobs who are calling the shots?
When I was in the Navy I made an error one day while on the helm, had the officer of the watch not caught my oops (turned port instead of starboard) I'd have been the one who made a mistake that sank or at least heavily damaged another Canadian warship. I'd not have been blamed or held to account for that act, the commanding officer would have been the one who was to blame for what was my mistake.
From a Robert Greenwald email notice sent earlier today:
"Netting $2.5 billion in profits last year wasn't enough for WellPoint, the nation's largest insurance company.
"Now, WellPoint's affiliate, Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield, is suing the state of Maine for refusing to guarantee it a profit margin in the midst of a painful recession.
"As if Mainers didn't have enough to worry about just struggling to put food on the table, WellPoint is intent on forcing them to cough up 18.5% higher premiums on their insurance policies.
"While WellPoint lobbies against granting Americans the right to affordable coverage, it's claiming that it has the right to a guaranteed profit margin, paid for by struggling working families."
If you think that's bad, energy utilities with nuclear power plants have gotten states to create a much bigger fix for them: forced rate hikes without any new services, and there will be no refunds if the plants are never built.
Yeah, that's one reason why nukes are opposed.
Writing as a former corporate drone who actually managed to climb to junior management (and was fortunate enough to put it into his rear view mirror with nary a nostalgic thought), it is not surprising that as rapacious an employer as Anthem Blue Cross and Wellpoint have screwed their workers. These companies are the very definition of corporations giving capitalism a bad name. As for those who worked there and now out in the cold; they can redeem yourself by blowing the whistle a la Wendell Potter.
We live in a country where we are constantly made to feel insecure and in fear about our basic needs. Then they numb us to our anxiety; we are fed silly or hate filled news programs that divide and conquer us on TV/ or fill shelves full of magazines to make us worry about our weight, our weddings, whether or not we are up to date with granite counter tops or jack and jill vanities. Hopefully one side effect of this economic melt down is that enough American people will wake up and not go back to sleep. Single payer needs to be explained in detail in every way possible. We need teach-ins like we had with the free speech movement. We need an anti-war movement like the one that finally stopped the Viet Nam War.
Didn't former WellPoint VP Liz Fowler, as senior counsel to Max Baucus, "help" craft the Baucus Bill? The same bill Consumer Watchdog called a defacto “deregulation of state consumer protection laws”?
http://4and20blackbirds.wordpress.com/2009/09/09/is-it-baucus-wellpoint-plan-or-is-it-wellpoints-baucus-plan/
I wonder how many rooms WellPoint books at Big Sky for Camp Baucus every year?
No wonder he needs the APF for protection when he comes home.
So when are we going to start fighting back?
"[T]o desire something strongly enough to fight for it does not guarantee success. But it changes the odds."