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Today's Top News
California Death Spiral
Health insurance premiums are surging — and conservatives fear that the spectacle will reinvigorate the push for reform. On the Fox Business Network, a host chided a vice president of WellPoint, which has told California customers to expect huge rate increases: “You handed the politicians red meat at a time when health care is being discussed. You gave it to them!”
Indeed. Sky-high rate increases make a powerful case for action. And they show, in particular, that we need comprehensive, guaranteed coverage — which is exactly what Democrats are trying to accomplish.
Here’s the story: About 800,000 people in California who buy insurance on the individual market — as opposed to getting it through their employers — are covered by Anthem Blue Cross, a WellPoint subsidiary. These are the people who were recently told to expect dramatic rate increases, in some cases as high as 39 percent.
Why the huge increase? It’s not profiteering, says WellPoint, which claims instead (without using the term) that it’s facing a classic insurance death spiral.
Bear in mind that private health insurance only works if insurers can sell policies to both sick and healthy customers. If too many healthy people decide that they’d rather take their chances and remain uninsured, the risk pool deteriorates, forcing insurers to raise premiums. This, in turn, leads more healthy people to drop coverage, worsening the risk pool even further, and so on.
Now, what WellPoint claims is that it has been forced to raise premiums because of “challenging economic times”: cash-strapped Californians have been dropping their policies or shifting into less-comprehensive plans. Those retaining coverage tend to be people with high current medical expenses. And the result, says the company, is a drastically worsening risk pool: in effect, a death spiral.
So the rate increases, WellPoint insists, aren’t its fault: “Other individual market insurers are facing the same dynamics and are being forced to take similar actions.” Indeed, a report released Thursday by the department of Health and Human Services shows that there have been steep actual or proposed increases in rates by a number of insurers.
But here’s the thing: suppose that we posit, provisionally, that the insurers aren’t the main villains in this story. Even so, California’s death spiral makes nonsense of all the main arguments against comprehensive health reform.
For example, some claim that health costs would fall dramatically if only insurance companies were allowed to sell policies across state lines. But California is already a huge market, with much more insurance competition than in other states; unfortunately, insurers compete mainly by trying to excel in the art of denying coverage to those who need it most. And competition hasn’t averted a death spiral. So why would creating a national market make things better?
More broadly, conservatives would have you believe that health insurance suffers from too much government interference. In fact, the real point of the push to allow interstate sales is that it would set off a race to the bottom, effectively eliminating state regulation. But California’s individual insurance market is already notable for its lack of regulation, certainly as compared with states like New York — yet the market is collapsing anyway.
Finally, there have been calls for minimalist health reform that would ban discrimination on the basis of pre-existing conditions and stop there. It’s a popular idea, but as every health economist knows, it’s also nonsense. For a ban on medical discrimination would lead to higher premiums for the healthy, and would, therefore, cause more and bigger death spirals.
So California’s woes show that conservative prescriptions for health reform just won’t work.
What would work? By all means, let’s ban discrimination on the basis of medical history — but we also have to keep healthy people in the risk pool, which means requiring that people purchase insurance. This, in turn, requires substantial aid to lower-income Americans so that they can afford coverage.
And if you put all of that together, you end up with something very much like the health reform bills that have already passed both the House and the Senate.
What about claims that these bills would force Americans into the clutches of greedy insurance companies? Well, the main answer is stronger regulation; but it would also be a very good idea, politically as well as substantively, for the Senate to use reconciliation to put the public option back into its bill.
But the main point is this: California’s death spiral is a reminder that our health care system is unraveling, and that inaction isn’t an option. Congress and the president need to make reform happen — now.
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Show All>>What about claims that these bills would force Americans into the clutches of greedy insurance companies? Well, the main answer is stronger regulation; but it would also be a very good idea, politically as well as substantively, for the Senate to use reconciliation to put the public option back into its bill
This fellow can not see the forest for the trees.
There is absolutely no need to have insurance companies involved in providing Health Care to Americans.
It is as simple as that.
You're right, GwNorth, it's as SIMPLE as that. Why in the world should we be paying a fortune to an unscrupulous "middle man" between us and our doctor who does nothing more than charge us a fortune to obtain medical services???
Only the doctor should be paid and a public option will bring this about, with a mere fraction of the cost of the insurance company's rapacious fees being spent on administrative charges.
MAYBE a public option would bring this about. What would almost certainly bring it about is if the public option is the only major option. In other words, single payer. Medicare-for-all. There would be no death spiral in a single payer nation. And responding rationally to that new mandate a single payer nation would put all the energy and money it was saving from the insurance siphon into improving food and agriculture, work, energy production and use, land use, equitable distribution, (including worldwide, thus reducing the need for war) and thus emotional health...into a comprehensive preventative health system to replace the sickening world and sick-care system we have.
We'd move from agriculture, eating, medicine, economy, work, and life as war-on-everything to a more life-affirming solar-wind economy rooted in nature.
And we'd help solve the 3 Cs--the 3 interlocking challenges of climate, constitution and the power of corporations that are together going to destroy civilization in the next 90 years unless stopped.
Not bad for a health plan, huh?
J4zonian for President!!!!
What is the "public option?"
I say it's a mirage.
Medicare--clean up and expand it to EVERY American who wants to enroll. We already have a "public option"
so don't let those DINOS Democrats sell you a worthless sack of shit.
Pay attention!
http://www.pnhp.org/
And if those on the right are concerned about all those insurance company employees being thrown out of work, the US could create a government jobs program where they could be paid to do something useful, for a change. Actually, the same government jobs program could be used to employ the former soldiers and MIC workers after the empire is dismantled. Fat chance, I know.
"What would work?"
You GKJL#$%& idiot!
Single payer. The health insurance industry adds absolutely nothing to the health and well-being of this country. In fact it does the exact opposite as this piece points out.
The cognative dissonance between what is blatently obvious and what the corporate schills in DC are proposing is becoming almost physically tangible.
The other thing this piece agains reaffirms is that the Republican Party is only concerned about political gamesmanship and could give one good shit about Americans and America in general. I find it incomprehensible that the scum have the audacity to still appear in public.
But you said it much more nicely and respectfully than I did Gwen.
Arrgghh. I mean ARRGGHH!!!
Please remember that Paul must defend his class. He is a well off, ivy league professor and Nobel Prize winner.
He does not want to jeopardize the privileges of his class. All he says and write is filtered through his privileged world view.
Well now we know the real reason for the health care "reform" that they want to ram down our throats. The industry and .gov also know about this death spiral so they want to force us to buy the crap insurance from the private companies so the health care Ponzi scheme can be kept going a while longer. What a bunch of B.S.
Ye gods, Paul: all those brains, all that tip-toeing through the logic of health insurance death spirals and you still can't quite get there. At the end you say maybe we should put in a public option.
Well, of course we should put in a public option - better known as SINGLE PAYER.
Throw out the ludicrous Health Insurer Perpetual Subsidy bill and bite the damn bullet already.
Let's get Medicare Part E (for Everyone) out the door and then start tackling the real problems in healthcare: lack of doctors, doctors' salaries, drug costs, hospital costs, even tort reform. Maybe we could even try to build in some preventive medicine for a change instead of having everyone wait until they have to go to the ER.
You're a smart guy, why do you continue to support this sham?
I am sure that Krugman knows about single payer. It appears that you don't know that single payer is not an option. It was not on the table. Bacus rejected it at the outset of the health care debate. It is better to watch the death spiral occur than to adopt a "socialist" single payer plan. It is preferable to do without health care and die a capitalist death than live under socialism.
King Obama rejected single payer.
Taking single payer off the table came from the White House.
Baucus is a smaller rodent on the political food chain.
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/02052010/watch3.html
California shows that neither private companies nor government deserve to monopolize health care. Let both of them compete and see who wins.
Um... how, exactly, does California show that government doesn't deserve to "monopolize" health care? Since it's never done so how can one draw a conclusion about it? Again though, minus fuzzy thinking, the debate in America today is not, never has been, about "government control of health care" (a la England). Merely about the government PAYING for health care (as in Canada).
Rudy,
Thank you.
Chelsea
They got tired of you trolling at Alternet I take it? At least over there you did more than offer soundbytes. I used to wonder about you, because you seemed intelligent enough. In fact, because I thought you were intelligent, I thought you had to be an outright liar. You, like others I can point out, betray your knowledge of the truth by the deftness with which you avoid it. You are a shill. And if you haven't seen 'your check' yet, then maybe you really are stupid.
...but they don't compete, EncinoM. One buys the other and runs it for its own aggrandizement. Then they make it look like they compete to keep the peasants from getting out the pitchforks and torches.
Now I don't know if the new POTUS could see the reality delineated in this piece coming, but this could possibly be the death knell for the health insurance industry.
If so I can't wait to spit on its grave.
"What would work?..."
"...something very much like the health reform bills that have already passed both the House and the Senate."...
------------
No Paul, wrong again.
Only Single-Payer can work for the long term.
Say it Paul, S-I-N-G-L-E-P-A-Y-E-R.
That wasn't so difficult was it?
I think our friend Shawn Berry likes these NO INSURANCE COMPANY LEFT BEHIND bills.
Where is he? Shawn are you here?
Health Care reform, or whatever Mr. Obamageddon calls it, is the same old con adjusted for the hopeful.
Want to get sick? Read this:
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/32255149/wall_streets_bailout_hustle/print
"Wall Street's Bailout Hustle"
We need to extend Medicare to all ages. The system is already in place.
I was a Medicaid Caseworker for years. Every year I watched as my elderly, who bought supplemental health insurance policies, got hit with sky rocketing increases, just to drive them off when they needed the care the most. Medicare pt D is a give away to the Insurance Companies, that is why Indiana began with 40 companies competing for clients, and the next year 60 companies were competing. (we were told that competition would lower the number of companies). My Niece works for Blue Cross in Florida and she said "my good insurance is gone and I have to pay a $6000 deductible prior to coverage for my self, husband (laid off)and 2 yr old Daughter." Indiana does not seem to be mentioned, but there is a 38% or more, increase here also.
Why is the Government avoiding doing the obvious, extending Medicare and allowing Medicare to bargain with the Drug Companies, like every other Country in the World, not to mention the VA. The VA gets it meds at 40% less than Medicare. Extending Medicare would also take pressure off the State's Medicaid.Who is the Government trying to avoid ticking off??
Everyone in nobody out. Single Payer. Extend Medicaid to cover everyone. Simple. Simple. Simple.
"And they show, in particular, that we need comprehensive, guaranteed coverage — which is exactly what Democrats are trying to accomplish."
Au contraire, Mr. Krugman. From the evidence I see, Democrats are trying to give the impression of concern for those without health care, but their real intention is to lock in insurance company profits, to increase those profits, while reducing funding for those in need (medicare and associated programs).
After all, the need is not for "health care" but for "health insurance", a fundamental human right ;) creating billions in profits for the elite, while delivering the most expensive "healthcare" in the western world, and to hell with those without "health insurance".
Add to that the goal of the medical industry - profits at nearly any expense while distributing medicine that makes you sick .. and requires further medical intervention.
Add in an FDA intent on deceit and pharma / chem profits, and you have our current system!
:)
Yet, what might "REAL" health CARE reform entail, Mr. Krugman?
This article reveals at least three things:
1 - WHY the insurance industry demanded and got a public MANDATE so that everyone, healthy, responsible, or otherwise, would be FORCED to buy their rigged, shoddy policies or else. (i.e. lock-in PROFITS without PEOPLE, paid for by PEOPLE through lemon socialism.) Meanwhile, despite posting RECORD profits amidst the "free" market "death spiral", that industry continues to increase its rates - 39% and up - for increasingly shoddy policies - with no price limits on the horizon as it is "free" to do whatever it wants in the spirit of "free" market competition.
(For reminders regarding how that California trick is turned see: Enron tapes expose blatant criminality of corporate America at http://www.wsws.org/articles/2004/jun2004/enro-j15.shtml
Remember, Grandma Millie?
"'All the money you guys stole from those poor grandmothers in California?' 'Yeah, grandma Millie, man' To which the Enron trader responds with utter contempt: 'Yeah, Grandma Millie, man. But she's the one who couldn't figure out how to (expletive) vote on the butterfly ballot.' 'Yeah, now she wants her f*cking money back for all the power you've charged right up, jammed right up her ass for f*cking $250 a megawatt hour.'...One trader is heard saying, 'Just cut 'em off. They're so f*cked. They should just bring back f*cking horses and carriages, f*cking lamps, f*cking kerosene lamps.'"
Lest we forget who and what we're dealing with.)
2 - WHY this corrupt for-profit industry needs strong regulation not found in this watered down bill currently crafted by its Senate (written and paid for by the insurance industry and its well-paid elected "bipartisan" representatives/fixers - Bayh, Lieberman, Grassley, Baucus, ad nauseum).
Just trust the industry to regulate itself with that good ole "free" market "competition" to "control" prices and "quality," eh? (See 1)
AND FINALLY
3 - WHY we need a STRONG PUBLIC OPTION FOR ALL at the least, yet SINGLE-PAYER most of ALL in the long-run.
REMINDERS FROM JUNE 2009
Two Key Health-Care Numbers
by Robert Parry
June 11, 2009
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2009/061109.html
"To understand the financial stakes involved in the battle over U.S. health-care reform, it’s useful to keep two numbers in mind: 50 million and 119 million.
The first number is the approximate total of Americans without health insurance, a new market that the private health insurance industry is salivating to get its hands on. The industry’s hope is that the government will mandate that those Americans sign up for private insurance and offer subsidies for those who can’t afford to pay the premiums.
Fifty million new customers and government largesse to help pay the bills would be a huge windfall for the insurance industry, which otherwise faces a decline in its market because Baby Boomers are reaching the age to qualify for Medicare and because rising unemployment is draining the pool of Americans who have insurance through their employers....
As Grassley – the top Republican on the Senate Finance Committee – noted in his column, “As many as 119 million Americans would shift from private coverage to the government plan,” putting “America on the path toward a completely government-run health care system. … Eventually, the government plan would overtake the entire market.”
While many Americans might say private industry brought that prospect on itself with its high-handed treatment of so many patients when they are most in need – when they are beset with serious illnesses – Grassley and other industry defenders see the solution as simply to exclude the public option.
Yet, as these industry defenders in Congress would strip out the public option, they appear to favor including a government mandate that would compel Americans – under some penalty of law – to obtain private insurance coverage either individually or through their employers (with the help of government subsidies if necessary).
That, of course, would be the ideal course for the industry, killing the public option – thus keeping the 119 million potential defectors in line – and forcing another 50 million Americans to sign up whether they want to or not. A win-win.
Rarely has a political debate more starkly highlighted the philosophical question of whether in a democracy, the government should represent the people’s interests or an industry’s.
It goes without saying that many members of Congress – both Republican and Democrat – have accepted hefty campaign contributions from the medical industry.
For instance, since 2005, Grassley’s various political action committees have collected nearly $1.3 million in donations from the industries related to the health insurance debate, according to OpenSecrets.org. Grassley’s top four donor groups were Health ($411,956); Insurance ($307,348); Pharmaceuticals ($233,850); and Hospitals ($197,137). Eighth on Grassley’s donor list were HMOs at $130,684.
In hitting the road on behalf of his health-reform initiative, President Obama is counting on the enthusiasm – and desperation – of many Americans to serve as a counterweight to the influence of industry lobbyists in Washington, who want to get the 50 million but don’t want to lose the 119 million.
The big question now is: how far will Obama and the Democrats go in demanding that the final legislation have in it what tens of millions of Americans want – a public option and a chance to escape the clutches of the private medical insurance industry – when that same powerful industry is deathly afraid of just that possibility."
........................
Apparently, too many were paid very well to ensure that any "REAL" reform would never go too far at all.
Yet, it's "interesting" to see some Democrats suddenly begin supporting a "public option" AFTER the fact, when its "safe" to do so now that there's little chance for it or any "real" reform. Looks good to do so, and election time's approaching and all.
Wonder if team DLC-OBAMA INC. will be including the needed PUBLIC OPTION now in their soon-to-be-released legislation ahead of the "Bi-Partisan-Fixer" summit, particularly in light of the Blue-Cross/Well Point profits/rates hikes...heist?
Oh, well. I suppose we're all just "f*cking retarded" to even inquire about such "trivial" matters as these all along, much less even THINK about them or raise these questions out loud. Afterall, what would Rahm say...pay....get paid?
Sioux Rose
RBC: When you think about it, your points 1 & 2 also fit the bankers. They ruined our economy, took the public money, handed each other big bonuses, and now are back in the same corrupt "business" that has never been fixed, although THE fix is sure in. Fiscal reality is teetering on the edge.
I think the same could be said for Blackwater and the entire MIC. Is winning a war tantamount to destroying a nation, a nation that never even attacked the U.S? If so, then I guess the continuing rampage into Afghanistan makes sense. But in my view, the war profiteers laid land and people to waste and are doing more of same, again, without the need to even ASK for the money being thrown at them. Their riches are not based on any metric of success that I can recognize.
Leaders who lied their way into extreme conflicts and USED weapons of mass destruction have walked away scot-free, and all the laws broken against citizens foreign and domestic are now seen as quaint misdemeanors, if that. In actuality, like something taken directly out of Orwell's novels, the laws are being retroactively altered to protect the trespassers. Citizens everywhere are expected to pay for the unapologetic sins of their leaders run amok, each one covering the other's ass.
As children we all played "follow the leader," and it's known that children do emulate those in positions of leadership. The net moral deficit seen in the examples of leaders in industry (Enron, bankers, Arthur Anderson style accounting, AIG, etc.) added to their political counterparts cannot be calculated. In all these areas those who break the rules and show the greatest callous disregard for their fellow citizens are the ones being crowned with success and riches. This truly is the fall of civilization, before the entire paradigm implodes and gives rise to what is next. We are witnessing a bonfire of the vanities, and almost Satanic rendition that is managing to invert the deadly sins and turn them into the exalted parables FOR living (of course at the expense of nature, much of humanity, and the wishes of the kingdoms of Light).
Well said! An eloquent description of the living consequences of historical capitalism - i.e. it's current incarnation as Neoliberalism.
Yes. The description fits ALL of them.
The Health Insurance INDUSTRY, Financial INDUSTRY, War INDUSTRY, Pharm Industry, Education INDUSTRY, Food INDUSTRY, etc. and the Neoliberal "Free" Market ETHICS that guide them all - the entire economic system itself: Unlimited Profit without People, by any means necessary, at any cost, regardless of any long term consequences. Period.
http://s818.photobucket.com/albums/zz105/dvdleo/?action=view¤t=oxfam3.jpg
And, within the "ethics" of the kind of "TOP/DOWN Leadership" you have described, the Leaders and their upper tiered subsidiaries who "break the rules and show the greatest callous disregard for their fellow citizens are the ones being crowned with success and riches."
That's the greed ethic that drives "capitalism," for those in that Upper tier, anywhere.
HOWEVER, at the same time, lest we forget, any of the "underlings" on the "lower" tiers who "break ANY minutia of any 'rules' for any reason and show the greatest callous disregard, or even the greatest concern and care for that matter, for their fellow citizens are the ones who will be crucified and punished to the fullest extent of the laws as dictated by those very "Leaders" at the top. Those underlings need to remember their place and stay there.
Don't get me wrong, unjust laws and rules exist and need to be broken and we need courageous people who will dare to question them and break them individually and together through principled acts of non-violent civil disobedience (i.e. historically, Jim Crow laws). Wisdom, to me, entails discerning which rules and laws are just - and how and when to break them as needed.
Believe it or not, currently in this country under the creeping Neoliberalism over the past decade (and not by coincidence), a mandated for-profit Neoliberal curriculum has sprung up in schools across ALL states that has deemed: the main reason there is any poverty anywhere is exclusively because those who are poor, and continue to remain so, continue to "help" and "care" for each other. And, to end poverty, that needs to stop (according to the curriculum).
The way out of poverty, the curriculum continues, is for the poor to know the rules but to look out only for themselves, break them as needed where profit is concerned, and "show the greatest callous disregard for their fellow citizens."
Then they too, can be crowned with the success and riches they deserve. Little Enron capitalists everywhere! (Well, MAYBE, AFTER they get out of prison for "breaking the rules as needed and showing the greatest callous disregard for their fellow citizens." Don't hold your breath.)
What a setup - to deny any inquiry into or deeper change needed within the greater system.
Here's an apt one critique of the framework: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FU-LMmpDYzw (Compare the critique to the Enron gents conversation.)
Perhaps C.S. Peirce in "Evolutionary Love," described the "ethic" most aptly a century ago, as it manifested in his time, in his critique of the capitalists' co opting of the rising evolutionary theories at the time in order to justify their ruthless economic system and its "ethics" (i.e. 19th century pre-hashed Tom Friedman flat world fantasies):
"...The Origin of Species of Darwin merely extends politico-economical views of progress to the entire realm of animal and vegetable life. The vast majority of our contemporary naturalists hold the opinion that the true cause of those exquisite and marvelous adaptations of nature for which, when I was a boy, men used to extol the divine wisdom, is that creatures are so crowded together that those of them that happen to have the slightest advantage force those less pushing into situations unfavorable to multiplication or even kill them before they reach the age of reproduction. Among animals, the mere mechanical individualism is vastly re-enforced as a power making for good by the animal's ruthless greed. As Darwin puts it on his title-page, it is the struggle for existence; and he should have added for his motto: Every individual for himself, and the Devil take the hindmost! Jesus, in his sermon on the Mount, expressed a different opinion.
[6.294]
Here, then, is the issue. The gospel of Christ says that progress comes from every individual merging his individuality in sympathy with his neighbors. On the other side, the conviction of the nineteenth century is that progress takes place by virtue of every individual's striving for himself with all his might and trampling his neighbor under foot whenever he gets a chance to do so. This may accurately be called the Gospel of Greed."
Regardless of one's religious affiliations, Peirce's critique is insightful as many of the ruthless capitalists then (and K Street-Family Kings do now) claimed Christianity - or to be devout Christians (Protestant work ethic/ rewards, etc.), yet the underlying ethic of capitalism, as Peirce revealed (and Michael Moore in our time, echoes), is anything but what Christ claimed!
Let's hope that there will always be mindful educators, students, and many others citizens who will fiercely counter and challenge Neoliberalism and its Greed ethic in schools and anywhere else, and any Neoliberal curriculum seeking to indoctrinate any generation blindly into its ideology.
(Oh, I forgot, the Neoliberals conveniently have proclaimed that they have no "ideology" and have "transcended" any at all, to prevent us from naming and critiquing it. LOL!)
Sioux Rose
RBC: Thank you for your post and compliment. You are surely "up" on a number of excellent sources, and I appreciate your sharing them with the forum. There is nothing I can add to your post, other than to again thank you for taking the time to spell out (and link together) a great many inter-connecting "dots."
Suck the blood out of the little people and throw their bodies away, a philosophy of life by way of death.
(For reminders regarding how that California corporate trick is turned, be it through the Insurance Industry or it's not so separate partners in the Energy Industry, see: Enron tapes expose blatant criminality of corporate America at http://www.wsws.org/articles/2004/jun2004/enro-j15.shtml
Remember, Grandma Millie?
"'All the money you guys stole from those poor grandmothers in California?' 'Yeah, grandma Millie, man' To which the Enron trader responds with utter contempt: 'Yeah, Grandma Millie, man. But she's the one who couldn't figure out how to (expletive) vote on the butterfly ballot.' 'Yeah, now she wants her f*cking money back for all the power you've charged right up, jammed right up her ass for f*cking $250 a megawatt hour.'...One trader is heard saying, 'Just cut 'em off. They're so f*cked. They should just bring back f*cking horses and carriages, f*cking lamps, f*cking kerosene lamps.'"
Lest we forget who and what we're dealing with.)
California has SB 810, which is a Single Payer bill. It has passed the Senate, and is now in the Assembly. However, the Governor has vetoed such legislation 3 years running.
This gets harder to veto every time. That's why the Republicans are upset. For every fresh increase another % of the population has to be willing to risk death to support their policies. That has to be a hard sell.
the cost of health care for
canada: 350 per month
france - 327 per month
usa 850 per month
and sorry krugman the democrats have NOTHING in their plan that would stop the increase in premiums.....
only to force us to buy a private product thta has been shown to be defective.....
all with the federal governemnt acting as the "police force" for the private companies.....
NPR's website ran an article comparing international medical costs. The countries included in the study were the US, Germany, France, Great Britian, Netherlands, Switzerland and Japan. The data is from July 2008.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=110997469
Costs are only one of the categories of this study, which also includes coverage, accessability, who pays and more.
Frontline's website has a series of interviews comparing health care between the US, Germany, Japan, Great Britian and Taiwan.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/sickaroundtheworld/interviews/
I also read a number of expat blogs where individuals relate their experiences with health care in the country in which they currently reside. What is significant about the sites linked above and the expat blogs is understanding the depth and complexity of comparing health care between countries. It just can't be reduced to a series of numbers such as monthly cost comparisons. Cheap health care, like cheap food, will come with its own hidden costs.
A
yes, mtdon,
someone here who can draw needs to show that in a cartoon: airborne infantry, helicopter gunships, tanks and riot police rounding up customers and corralling them into a long long line into the transamerica building to buy health insurance under penalty of death or concentration camp. heimat security people in black lurking around the corners looking for escapees.
any takers?
Sioux Rose
PROF: I had not read down the thread when I posted. I see you and I are virtually stating the same thing. The NY Times probably won't allow a respected columnist to take the single payer route... it would offend their advertisers. Drug ads are a huge source of revenue in all media venues.
I agree with the Visiting Professor, your remarks are always well thought out, well written and I find them to be informative and enlightening, many times more so than the article.
Just over a week ago*, Krugman reacted to Obama's nauseating stroking of banksters by asking rhetorically, "[H]ow is it possible, at this late date, for Obama to be this clueless?"
Astute commenters noted that Krugman's uncharacteristically "strong" criticism was published in Krugman's blog, not a NY Times column. It was suggested that Krugman wouldn't express such consternation in a regular NYT column, and/or that the NYT wouldn't publish it if he did.
Indeed, this non-blog article is a return to typical, orthodox Krugman.
Is Krugman being "paid" by insurance corporations? Maybe, but one need not believe this to explain this article. Krugman is very much a nice-guy moderate, centrist Establishment gatekeeper.
IMO, his "Mister Krugman's Neighborhood" demeanor and style is deceptive and disarming. It took his bland, matter-of-fact support for "mandatory" health insurance to open my eyes to his cold-blooded ruthlessness.
He's a time-serving mandarin like Alan Greenspan, blithely serving up his own cluelessness as sound economic doctrine.
I've been wondering lately why the term "the Establishment" ever fell out of use-- it certainly isn't because it's meaningless or useless. Here, my point is that Krugman is bought and paid for by "the Establishment", and his place in its upper echelon, such that the health insurance industry doesn't HAVE to seal the deal.
* http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/02/10-13
· Yr Obd't Servant
Did you read the article written by Krugman where he endorses the reappointment of Bernanke? He admits that Bernanke is someone who helped his with his position. Need I say more?
the jobs that produce tax revenues are disappearing, and for good reason...
human health is a subset of planetary health...
if we are not primarily concerned with the health of the planet, we will be very disappointed at trying to maintain our own...
even under ideal circumstances, one cannot postpone death indefinitely...
I'm sorry to have to say this, but this article feels like something written by a shill for the DNC. For all the reasons observed by earlier posters here.
Corruption kills. Single payer, Paul. Single payer.
Then we need to rewrite Medicare Part Duh.
-30-
Sioux
OLE MAN: Exactly! Any economist would HAVE to see (lest his paycheck depended on a certain blindness) that the best way to go is to have the medical field paid directly from taxes/payments made to the states or federal government for the express purpose of providing care. Insurance is the "middle man" and operates like the neighborhood CRACK dealer standing there with his hand out for his cut while the person in need of "the drug" quivers between life and death. Only a paid shill would fail to point out the enormous, unnecessary WASTE that this middle man represents. Doctors and their staffs hate the paper work, paying "customers" can't understand what the fine print means, there IS no viable regulation (so that those in need, as Donna Smith so often relates, are often cut off before given the treatments they require), business costs are driven up through high premiums, and for what? So some intermediary gets to play toll-booth with the population's health care needs? Here is the most ghastly demonstration of profits before people, a fine companion to a nation that throws its money at war and weapons design while its schools, bridges, and cities fall into disrepair. With priorities like this, hope is about all that's still left on tap.
Indeed, Krugman sets up the the glaring need to disintermediate the parasitic profiteers with the most obvious solution, Medicare for all---very little AWOL Obama salesmanship required. But he stunningly drops the ball and reverts to the same absurd enslavement provisions of the Senate farce, mandatory purchase by individuals and guaranteed profit for insurers. Disgraceful.
Krugman is a shill. He's with the NYT for gawdsakes!
It's gonna keep getting worse until these corporate fuckers are absolutley terrified to show their face anywhere.
Krugman: "But here’s the thing: suppose that we posit, provisionally, that the insurers aren’t the main villains in this story. Even so, California’s death spiral makes nonsense of all the main arguments against comprehensive health reform."
Then he lists 3 arguments that are non sequiturs: insurance across state lines, government regulation and pre-existing conditions. . . .
Back up there Kruggy. IF we accept that "insurers are not the main villians," then presumably they simply pass along costs increases from hospitals, drug companies and doctors. Right? So how would mandating that healthy people buy insurance do anything to control those costs?
Kruggy finishes with this: "What would work? ... requiring that people purchase insurance."
So the insurers mustn't be allowed to go into a "death spiral," but it's perfectly acceptable to put working people into a death spiral of passing more and more costs on to them. These - let's call them customers - must not be allowed to make a rational, free-market decision to not buy insurance.
As a member of the dismal science, Krugman knows full well how to model what happens if you mandate the purchase of a product. Couldn't the massive government subsidies already being paid to buoy up the price of everything medical have something to do with rising costs? Couldn't insurers be pocketing more and more profit knowing Uncle Sam ultimately backstops all the bills? Should we ignore the supply side subsidies that move price up and blame demand, the consume-customer-citizen-patient, for not consuming enough insurance to meet lower price?
If the D Party delivers us as unwilling customers, does Krugman's economics not predict that after a temporary slowing of price increases to reflect more indentured customers, prices will go UP.
Long live the Death Spiral! -- couldn't happen to a nicer crop of thugs.
Given the near-total lack of cooperation on the part of politicians and the banality-of-evil psychopathy of the industry, this is exactly what needs to happen.
As private companies flail and prices explode, the push for single payer will rise, and it is already close to %70.
Facing failure, the companies will charge more, pay less, and look for creative loopholes to pocket clients' money as they fold.
Hold out for single payer!
Now if we can only figure out how to apply the death spiral to Wal-Mart, Wall Street and the giant banks.
Amen.
While we're figuring, let's be sure to stop or reduce purchases from them. That has to be part of the answer.
Put your money in a credit union. Leave it parked; walk or ride a bicycle. Eat less meat; brown beans and corn make a complete protein. Don't buy stuff you don't use very often from Wal-mart or any other store. Share what you have, not what you have left over. Turn the heat down. Cuddle more.