A letter that will go into file 13 and says please and thank you for your kind consideration. Just more talk,talk and talk with no action;nada,zip,ziltch,NOTHING.This is betrayal of the people of the most gross kind.I wonderif we as citizens will get a dear john letter? Tony

Or else what?

Joe

I'm quite certain the insurance companies are quaking in their boots over... wait -- they're LAUGHING not quaking.

Gary

“Politeness is the most acceptable hypocrisy”
-- Ambrose Bierce

-"Put it on a Web site, tell us what your loss trends are," she said. "Tell us what you're paying out. Tell us what you're spending in overhead and CEO salaries and advertising."

Yes that's right obamabots, don't even think about all the other advanced democracies, where everyone gets proper healthcare for a third to one half what those in America pay (the Americans that have any health coverage at all)

While you are paying your raising rates, deductables and co-pays (things that people elsewhere in the world don't have to deal with)

You can seek comfort in the knowledge that Obama's campaign contributors are posting their double digit price increases on a website.

Here's hoping your deductable doesn't push you into bankruptcy!!!

Of course it is the insurance corporations that have the teeth here, to raise rates and maintain fiscal secrecy at will. Ms. Sebelius will be replaced in three years, or sooner if she were actually to become a threat to corporate opacity. In a free society public service corporations would be subject to public scrutiny, but our particular society took a different path some years ago. We don't have a lot of choices at this point. We can move to France. We can initiate the long, suicidal, bloody process of dislodging these parasites from power. Or we can get used to it. We're too dumb to learn French and too brainwashed and fat to get militant, so my guess is we'll go for #3.

I have had a hard time listening to Sebelius ever since her NPR interview where she was very adamant that the bill would not be a "path to single-payer." Very adamant indeed. More faux outrage. And the insurance company execs are absolutely quaking in their boots over this, I'm sure.

So Barry dropped by the meeting "briefly" to exploit a cancer victim for a photo op. I'll bet those insurance CEOs were sobbing with grief after they read that letter. This worm sold out his suppporters with his backroom deals with these same "executives" months ago.

Who does he think he is kidding?

Oh, and by the way, I wouldn't hold my breath about any transparency from these snakes if I were you.

Corporation's only mandate is to profit its owners and shareholders. Politicians know that. Begging them to consider people is political theater, but it is designed to gather the needed public support for establishing some regulations that will cut into corporate profits and help the people.

"Or else what?" is right.

Unless you stick a gun to these bastards heads (metaphorically speaking, of course), you will never ever get "transparency".

It is obvious that these guys got balls of steel or they wouldn't be so blatant in the first place.

C'mon, O'Bama, you are the president...stand up now...

Oh, great... and my health insurance doesn't cover really nasty earworms:

♫ I wanna kiss you in Paris
I wanna hold your hand in Rome
I wanna run naked in a rainstorm
Make love in a train cross-country
You put this in me
So now what, so now what?

Chorus:

Wanting, needing, waiting
For you to justify my love

Hoping, praying
For you to justify my love ♫
_______________________________

PS: Just when you think Obama can't sink any lower, he has the-- yes, audacity-- to piggyback himself for political advantage onto the tragedy of a dying woman victimized by ruthless, depraved, self-serving Elected Misrepresentatives like himself. And in so doing, pretend that he is somehow "part of the solution", no less.

This from a man who kinda-sorta supports the idea of insurance corporations leeching financial blood from the ordinary unprivileged citizens to secure and improve their bottom line.

Obama and his political and financial cohort clearly subscribe to the notion that if they had like to die, they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population. Such stark, vicious misanthropy can't be drowned out by occasional violin solos.

· Yr Obd't Servant

The "jaw-dropping rate increases" are necessary to bribe congress and pay for astronomical bonuses for the execs who are so very busy eating, drinking and being merry.
Congress knows very well that the Death Dealing Tributes to insurance gangsters can only be overcome by Single Payer Healthcare. I'm awaiting November...

Answer:

The industry is raising rates in order to maintain huge profit margins in order to allow maintenance of huge executive salaries.

Short version: "We wanna stay filthy rich."

The gist of this article is that the HHS secritary, who is supposed to be working for the benefit citizens everywere, is actually, while on the taxpayers payroll, providing free business strategy consuting services for the big insurance companies.

And today on C-span, I caught Obama saying that once he signs an energy conservation tax credit bill, homeowners can go to their nearest "Lowe's" or "Home Depot" for new windows and insulation. I'm not making this up.

It all gets more vile by the day.

Whether its:

"Put it on a Web site, tell us what your loss trends are," she said. "Tell us what you're paying out. Tell us what you're spending in overhead and CEO salaries and advertising."

or:

"Justify High Rates, Health Secretary Tells Health Insurance Execs"

What the Democrats, Sebelius and the media are doing is framing the issue as a matter of greed and wastefulness rather than structural.

That's so the Democrats can address the "problem" with meaningless techinical fixes like regulation. Regulation of our healthcare industry is meaningless because what is making the rates continue to go up is not so much greed or wastefulness but how the system itself is structered.

So when Sebelius demands the insurance companies "justify" their high rates--they can!

This is a true statement:

"WellPoint executives have blamed their rate increases in California, which average about 39 percent for individuals, on rising medical costs and a pool of customers that is gradually becoming older and sicker as younger, healthier people drop their coverage."

The lie is Obama, the Democrats, Sebelius and the media accepting the premise--despite all the evidence to the contrary--that the for-profit model of healthcare actually works.

In other words, things are so bad the insurance companies don't even need to lie. Everyone else does it for them.

"WellPoint executives have blamed their rate increases in California, which average about 39 percent for individuals, on rising medical costs and a pool of customers that is gradually becoming older and sicker as younger, healthier people drop their coverage."

If this is true then these companies are in a declining business as price increases force more and more young healthy citizens out of the market while their elderly clients die off.

The only way to save these companies is to *gasp* force the young and healthy to buy their product.

If this isn't true then its merely a diabolical negotiating technique. But these companies who are concerned with human welfare wouldn't do that, would they?

Didn't the elites divide and conquer the people by putting each into his/her own big honkin' SUV and 3000 sqft house? Trapped in their gilded cages, individual USans cannot grip the collective sledgehammer and swing it where it needs to be swung.

Justify High Rates, Health Secretary Tells Health Insurance Execs.

Funny how one can read this to mean 2 different things at once. Clever.

Why is it that the media insists upon calling it health "care" legislation. It isn't. It is health INSURANCE legislation.

This legislation has NOTHING to do with health CARE.

It's about how much the Congress is willing to regulate the insurance industry, and still protect their campaign contributions.

If we were really getting health CARE reform, they'd be giving us Universal Single-payer, like civilized countries have had for decades.

Compare what Wendell Potter (former insurance executive) said on Moyers last night:

"The free market does not work in health care like it does in other sectors of the economy. In fact, it works just the opposite. And what's happening is that competition is driving up cost. It's not controlling cost. It's driving them up. It doesn't work like other sectors of the economy."

and what current insurance executives say in this article:

"WellPoint executives have blamed their rate increases in California, which average about 39 percent for individuals, on rising medical costs and a pool of customers that is gradually becoming older and sicker as younger, healthier people drop their coverage."

Both are saying pretty much the same thing: the for-profit healthcare system does not work.

But instead of calling for taking the profit-motive out of the healthcare system, Potter is supporting Obama's bill to regulate it.

In other words, Potter wants the government to "regulate" a system that he himself says does not work.

Anyone reading this already knows how that kind of regulation turns out.

But even more important, what Potter and the insurance execs--with the help of the Democrats, media etc. have been able to accomplish is a crucial turning point:

They've made the actual cause of the failure of the healthcare system not only irrelevent, they've shifted the onus for that system's failure.

The insurance industry now will no longer be responsible to make the failed healthcare system work---it is now the government's responsibility to make the same failed system work.

So all the insurance industry and their allies have to do is keep stating the obvious, have the government respond by validating the cutting of services, raising rates, adding mandates and subsidies while the insurance companies sit back and rake in the money.

As Wendell Potter says on Moyers:

"The private market has lost its ability to control these costs, so the federal government has to step in and play some role. And I think that we'll begin to see that with this legislation. "

He's absolutely right.

One takes the blame, the other takes the profits. What a team.

I found this sentence interesting: "With comprehensive health care legislation struggling on Capitol Hill, the White House is trying to focus public attention on the record-setting insurance premium increases being announced from Connecticut to California."

Didn't Obama meet with insurance execs last year -- before the rate increases -- to draft health insurance legislation? Maybe the insurance cos. agreed then to institute "staggering" rate increases in January to help the White House convince Americans to either accept his plan or be forced to pay rates they simply can't afford.