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Losing Our Moral Compass in Pursuit of Profit, Efficiency
Recently, on a cold morning with a little snow fooling around in the bright air, I was chilled by this sentence in an AP news story:
"The idea isn't to just raise revenue, economists say, but finally to turn Americans into frugal health-care consumers by having them face the full costs of their medical decisions ("Tax Break on Employer Health Plans Targeted" Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar, AP 11/29/10)
Oh, of course -- all Americans should face the full costs of their decisions to have broken bones, heart attacks, or sick children, right?
Even more chilling to me were the underlying assumptions that economists/technocrats decide what's best for everyone, and that it's just as important -- if not more important -- to turn Americans into tame consumers for the private sector as it is to raise revenues for the common good.
This led me to some further, chillier assumptions:
- democracy and politics are messy and unmanageable and must be replaced by the disciplined professionalism of scientists, technicians and economists.
- ordinary citizens lack the ability to deal with the "real world" of money, brokerage, extraction of natural resources, wars, weapons and political power, and must be kept out of decisions about them or even knowing about them.
- our most important moral obligation to our children is to not leave them any debts.
- to be secure we must pre-emptively kill terrorists, would-be terrorists, might-be terrorists, geriatric terrorists, stone-throwing juvenile terrorists.....
- the economically sound is the morally right.
In his recent book "The Logic of Discipline", Alasdair Roberts proposes that democracy has been undermined by financial liberalization, free trade and a globalized economy. Technicians, economists and managers, he observes, are very skeptical of the ability of democracy to make "the right decisions" for financial stability and security, and they doubt that ordinary politicians and voters are ‘disciplined' enough to make sensible policy decisions.
That's why, Roberts suggests, we have a new generation of professional technocrats and managers supported by corporate money and ideology who are running not only our giant corporations but our political parties and our governments. They have reconfigured central banking, fiscal control, farm policy, taxes, health and safety regulations, port and airport management, infrastructure development and energy policy to meet the economic needs of multinational corporations in a global economy, not the needs of human beings on a fragile planet. And they have determined that secrecy is a basic necessity for good management, to keep the public from interfering with the professionals' decisions.
That's why we have public officials, democratically-elected (sic) politicians, banks and giant corporations like Amazon & PayPal all deciding that WikiLeaks is a criminal operation and Julian Assange is a terrorist who deserves to die.
Roberts further notes that the world of fiscal discipline is amoral: efficiency and objectivity always trump emotional and unreliable ideas of right and wrong
That's why -- or at least how -- in the pursuit of profit, efficiency and financial stability in global marketplaces, Americans are losing our moral compass. Many people now believe -- or say they believe -- that our most important moral responsibility is to the economy: reduce the deficit, cut taxes, protect profits, and shrink government spending, and keep actions of public officials secret.
So: we have messed up the entire world socially, economically, politically and morally, and have failed to address our habits of consumption that are warming the planet and destroying ecosystems that sustain the web of life. The oceans are rising, disaster and disease stalk humans and ecosystems, war and destruction consume natural resources, but the most important things to us are to cut taxes and government spending, reduce the deficit and keep secret the actions and words of government officials because we the people can't be trusted.
We don't even trust coming generations to find better ways to live together. Instead, we base our expenditures for their education, nutrition and health care on principles of profit and "fiscal responsibility", we teach them that killing in war is noble and exciting, and that most strangers should be feared and mistrusted, while we use up the natural resources they will need to survive.
What now? In this Christmas season it's tempting to speculate: What if God, finally fed up with our arrogance, pride, greed, cruelty and bungling, decided to send down a new prophet, a few more angels, or another Savior, what would they recommend?
A new prophet could hardly do better than Micah: "...what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?"
The angels of the nativity story gave us a fine moral ideal to aspire to: Peace on earth and good will toward all, but it's never caught on. Neither has the excellent advice of Jesus of Nazareth: Love your neighbors, turn the other cheek, go the extra mile.
Because finally, democracy and freedom cannot be created by a Savior, or by economists or presidents. Democracy can only be created by the people within it. If people can be "turned into frugal consumers" or kept in the dark about how their government operates, they aren't free and there is no democracy: they are not participants but pawns, not citizens but subjects.
216 Comments so far
Show AllIts called FASCISM, been here for decades. The essential ingredients were taken from the fascism of Italy and Germany.
You seem to be woefully ignorant about some aspects of Fascism. In Germany, under Hitler, of course you had to be an Aryan, you were not charged with the full costs of, say, a broken bone, especially if you happened to be a strapping Hitler-Jugend boy expected to eventually serve in Hitler's armed forces. There was not only a "right to work" but a "must to work" for rearmament with the aim to go to war. What is happening in our nation is not exactly fascism but a half-hearten return to the "good old days" of the Industrial Revolution when children worked 10 hours each day, life expectancy hovered around 50 years, and no working person was insured for health care.
Yes. Anyone who wants to see what the current trends are leading us to should read the novels of Dickens.
I agree with you that Dickens' novels are a good predictor of what may happen to our nation. Much better actually than "Mein Kampf".
Upton Sinclair too.
Read those authors and walk the streets of your third world nation of choice...be sure to check out the concrete walls with glass shards embeded on top surroundind houses, and the number of machine gun toting cops.
"Yes. Anyone who wants to see what the current trends are leading us to should read the novels of Dickens."
Or look at what is happening in China. Today.
Fascism is the corprate state, corpratism. We merged the two together before WWII, ours is the "good fascism".
Every economic analyst that I know of has written that the only true "corporate state" of the 1930's-40's was Franco's Spain. In Hitler's Germany and to a lesser extent in Italy there was a what some observers have called a "multi-power-centered economy" in which various agencies and their bosses (Goering, Funk, Speer, etc.) competed against one another for Hitler's blessings and big industrialists such as Krupp had a remarkable degree of "freedom" except during the last year of WW2. A truly "corporate state" would never allow this sort of pandemonium to happen and Franco had any "capitalist" jailed who did not perfectly toe his line.
Ours is just more disguised and masked. Fight over the small details to your hearts content, but whatever "type" it is, its still fascism.
In a letter to Congress in 1938, former President Franklin D. Roosevelt wrote the following:
"Unhappy events abroad have retaught us two simple truths about the liberty of a democratic people. The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic State itself. That, in its essence, is fascism—ownership of government by an individual, by a group or by any other controlling private power."
Fascism started in Italy and spread to Spain. Neither of those strains of Fascism followed the Nazi model, but they were still Fascists.
Spain never even entered the war under Franco. Franco was still a Fascist.
Calling the US political economy either fascist or non-fascist is like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. Fascism is one of the labels which tends to evoke a lot of emotional response, and people start losing sight of the bigger issues. The fact of the matter is that in the US it is capital which dictates the priorities of our society. I consider the US a capitalist dictatorship.
NH Working Families Xmass skit on budget cuts
Bah! HumBUG!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vnbo8oKb5X0
Or, as Chomsky calls it, inverted fascism.
Really, it's more like corporate feudalism. More than anything it resembles the miserable conditons the Romans created for every one of their colonies from Egypt to Britain. It's probably a subliminal kind of thing that every feudal/fascist dream involves architecture that mimics the Roman empire's. Look around.
Capitalism will turn democracy into fascism.
When you study how Hitler became chancellor and subsequently dictator of Germany you must factor in not only "capitalism" but the fact that he got there on a huge wave of popular assent. Almost every documentary from that era shows thousands if not hundreds of thousands of Germans with raised right arm shouting in unison "Heil Hitler". These Germans were not totally deluded. They understood pretty well what their Fuehrer wanted to achieve. They chose to attain a high living standard via war and genocide. Like the "democracies" of England and France had done during the 19th century.
A demise of "democracy" here will happen because of the passivity of our nation.
Finally, I am not so sure that American Capitalists want a Hitler- or Mussolini-style fascism here with its almost total control and regulation of commerce and industry. As long as the armed forces and police follow their orders there will not be such a kind of fascism here. Life for the working class will become ugly, however.
Your understanding of Nazi fascism is shallow and incomplete. You appear to be ignorant of the forces led up to the images of "thousands of Germans with raised right arms". Most of those folks were not there of their own free will. What's happening in the US today really more resembles the situations described at length in Dickens's works. Robber baron capitalism predates the fascisms you refer to. It is a feature of unbridled industrialism then, and complicated by unbridled capitalism now.
Besides Dickens, you might try to read some Victor Hugo (Les Miserables - it's a biiiig book) and Bertold Brecht. You might also look at some lithographs by Kathe Kollwitz for images of the misery that predated Nazism.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%A4the_Kollwitz
Also, read Brecht's "Fear and Misery of the Third Reich"
Or you might consider some of the preludes of Nazism - the weavers' revolt and the peasant war - and the Treaty of Versailles.
I am not making an apologia for nazism or fascism. Just, you've got to get a better understanding of the stuff that leads to that kind of moral outrage. There are lots of layers of social and political forces that brought down the most civilized country of its day. (not something you could say for America, is it? the drop is much shorter.)
And, frankly, I'm fed up with the abbreviated, superficial Hogan's Heroes cartoon version of those horrible 12 years, that everyone keeps referring to. The stuff that's happening in the Anglo countries today started during the peak of the British Empire - enclosures, evictions, hegemony on many levels, and nascent industrialization.
It's easy to be brave when you're 5000 miles and 4 generations removed from events. How about you learning something about history and being brave now, while it still matters?
red balloon
What you have written is for the most part true. However, I don't think that it refutes one of Crowsnest's main points: "These Germans were not totally deluded. They understood pretty well what their Fuehrer wanted to achieve. They chose to attain a high living standard via war and genocide." There may have been some brave people at that point in time, but then as now, the number of brave souls is not enough (or doesn't seem to be enough) to stop the decline/collapse.
Also, I take it from your mention of enclosures and evictions at the peak of the British Empire that you've read The Great Transformation by Karl Polanyi. If you haven't, I'd highly recommend it. best regards...
I'll look that book up, thanks for mentioning it.
I have copies of the Leni Riefenstahl films of the huge rallies and public spectacles. You have to know they were staged - and at a time when the world was still positively disposed toward that odious pustule, Hitler. Anyway, did anyone in the rest of the civilized world do anything to oppose Hitler's machine of oppression as long as he held the Commies at bay and made a lot of money for the global corporates? They really did have a choice - they chose money.
Plus ca change...
Cheers
"I am not so sure that American Capitalists want a Hitler- or Mussolini-style fascism here with its almost total control and regulation of commerce and industry."
American Capitalists want the sort of deal that Boeing once had when the late Senator Jackson was known as "The Senator from Boeing." He did not have to be bribed to shill for the company; he just did things that favored the company because he seemed to think that what was good for Boeing was good for the country.
Wasn't Jackson also a big friend of all the other bid "defense" contractors - notably General Dynamics ship and submarine division. The US Navy even specially named an Ohio-class ballistic missile submarine (normally named for US states) after him - The USS Henry M. Jackson SSBN 730).
What a fucking war-pig.
SaboCat, yes they did. The U.S. Navy also named four of the last Sturgeon class submarines, not for fish or sealife like the rest of the class, but for powerful members of congress who controlled the purse strings.
USS William H. Bates SSN-680
USS Glenard P. Lipscomb SSN-685 (Not a Sturgeon class but a one of kind turbo electric vice steam engine)
USS L. Mendel Rivers SSN-686
USS Richard B. Russel SSN-687
Military spending, and use, has rarely been about what is necessary but about what can be gotten away with for profit and private gain. One of the great tragedies has been our military, particularly the officer corps, becoming divorced from the remainder of society. There are no voices of moderation among those who wield the positions of power in the military. As bad as things may have been, they are even worse today.
As Omar Bradley said to George Patton in the movie Patton,
"There's one big difference between you and me, George. I do this job because I've been trained to do it. You do it because you LOVE it."
From France
You may want to add the US along side France and England, after all it expanded it's territory to the south by wars, i'm thinking New Mexico, Arizona, California, Colorado, plus that atrocious genocide you guys always seem to forget when talking about your history... and by the way most of 19th centuary France wasn't a democracy, far from it; 2 tentatives of revolutions (much more interesting than the first 1789 one)and plenty wars from its neighbors...
Capitalism or the free market has not been practiced in the USA for a century. This is fascist, by that I mean a merger of State and Corprate power.
Capitalism will always will form corporations and always will control governments. That is what "the free market" and Capitalism will always lead to.
The label "fascist" isn't anything other than a label. It doesn't tell us anything. Endless debates break out about what we should call "it" - as though that changes anything. State and corporate power have always been "merged" in the US.
I think people are tying to make a distinction between the real, true good America, and this bad thing we have now. They are one and the same.
Throughout history, the rich have always been against democracy (let them eat cake!) and control by the people. The "democracy" we have now is a charade: every few years we exercise "democracy" by voting a bunch of rich guys into office, where they can go about serving their own interests with our consent. It is becoming less and less important for them to even show sincerity anymore--note how Obama blatantly disgarded his mandate and gutted any hope for single payer, medicare for all, tough banking regulations, no tax cuts for the rich, etc. Once the rich have the military and police under their control, they no longer have to fear the mobs--er, democratic protests. As long as we equate voting with democracy, that's about all they'll ever give us.
"The rich have always been against democracy" - true enough. However, when I grew up (in Europe) we discussed all the essential ideas of how a society could be designed to serve people. That kind of discussion has been successfully suppressed in this country since the 20's and 30's - principally by the power of the rich over the communications media. So the tragedy we now face is that people have been so brainwashed about individual "success", competition, "free markets" etc. that they will vote and act against their own interests and help accelerate the destruction of civil society.
Perhaps the comment made several years ago in reference to some of those killed in the events of 9/11 about the 'thousand little Eichmann's' wasn't so far off the mark.
The Nazi's were all about efficiency. Their ideological descendants are a thousand times more sophisticated when it comes to manipulating the public perception.
After-all, they have convinced the 'average American' that they are 'free'...
Non Serviam - I will not serve.
"After-all, they have convinced the 'average American' that they are 'free'..." Yea I just shake my head in sadness every time I hear Palin shriek in her nasally voice some crap about freedom, as she convinces her followers to do things against their own best interests.
Arnold believes in democracy, its power to make the changes that are demanded by the times. She dismisses reliance on "scientists, technicians, and economists," believing the people have it within themselves to do the right thing.
I wish I could believe her. The problems are complex: the budget, global warming, trade issues, money and banking, foreign policy. No amount of education, no amount of balanced media coverage of events and issues, no amount of election reform will be sufficient to inform voters and give them clear-cut choices in their selection of leaders or in the adoption of policies. Half of Americans don't believe in human-caused global warming. Just less than half believe that evolution did not happen. A large majority think the nation's debt is just like their own personal debt. Sizable numbers believe foreign aid and pork barrel projects make up a large portion of the federal budget. It's true the media does not do its job in educating voters, but the truth is out there. Most people are too busy to pay attention--or else, they believe they understand things they don't.
Would that scientists, technicians, economists (and other professionals) really did run things. Instead, politicians do, equally as uninformed as the voters are. I would support a Congress that acts as a school board, setting goals, hiring and firing a superintendent, supervising, publicizing, expressing concerns--if necessary--but never making policy. They should hire professionals for that. Yes, Arnold is right--democracy is messy--so messy concerted action to solve any problem is impossible. Let the elected leaders hire someone who can get the job done (retaining the ability to fire him/her) for criminality or malfeasance. That way we might have a chance to respond to the monstrous challenges we face now.
Everything you say is reasonable. But one sentence bothers me.
"Let the elected leaders hire someone who can get the job done (retaining the ability to fire him/her) for criminality or malfeasance."
This is how large corporations are supposed to be run. The board of directors hires professionals to operate the company, and has the power to replace them at any time. But it doesn't work that way. The professionals stack the board with toadys and do whatever they want. It is hard to believe that professional managers at the federal level could not accomplish something similar.
School boards are elected and they can (and do) fire incompetent or dishonest superintendents.
"The problems are complex: the budget, global warming, trade issues, money and banking, foreign policy. No amount of education, no amount of balanced media coverage of events and issues, no amount of election reform will be sufficient to inform voters and give them clear-cut choices in their selection of leaders or in the adoption of policies."
Yup, they certainly are complex - by design. The best way to consolidate power is by "complexifying" something such that it requires an "expert" to manage it. Not that things are not difficult, they are, but Rube Goldberg was an excellent illustrator of the ability of folks to make simple things complex - you should check out his stuff, all very "technical", "complex" machines for performing simple tasks.
"Would that scientists, technicians, economists (and other professionals) really did run things."
Shudder, the problem is that in so many ways they already do. Even Inhofe (sp?), arch rival of the global warming thesis can pull a few "scientists" and "experts" out of his hat to back him up. Scientists and experts have been used throughout history to perpetrate some of the worst disasters man has produced. So which ones should be chosen and who gets to choose them?
Lord, save me from your utopia, drosera ....
"Experts" make useful advisors - planning cannot proceed in the dark, but as makers of policy using "science" as the measure of all things? Two thumbs down on that one ....
Yup, aquifer, to hell with science and technology - stop banging those rocks together now!
Oh, c'mon, man, what a throwaway line. You know darn well that's not what i am arguing for. I thought of you as someone, unlike others, who didn't engage in such BS. What did I miss?
Thanks for this water, Aquifer. :)
I think many of us have at one time or another mistakenly thought that someone(s) else more powerful or more able than ourself is going to seize the reins and lead where we can follow. Instead, it is likely our human purpose is to learn to lead ourselves and not give away our own authority.
Every individual has to find their own internal compass. First know one's true self and seek and explore for oneself the meaning of True, Unconditional Love. Then the way becomes clear and one can act accordingly. It's enough.
The complexity has to do with levels of abstraction. Thousands of years ago the major problem was getting the fire lit. Now it has to do with reducing carbon emissions. The economy had to do with getting and hoarding gold. Now it is about QE2 and the derivatives market. Things are complicated now, but it is not due to purposefully making them complex. It has to do with the liberation of our thinking, building upon our past experience through literacy, and creating new perspectives and new technology never conceived. It is not that most people are incapable of understanding abstract thinking; with much, much prodding and practice, they could. It's just that they don't want to. They (rightfully, in my opinion) imagine there are other domains within a single human life they wish to explore.
You don't really believe Imhoff can pull his own scientists out of a hat, do you? Real ones? Scientists and other professionals are not at fault for the misuse of technology--the politicians are. (proving my point)
"The complexity has to do with levels of abstraction."
Yes, indeed. Whitehead summarized the pitfalls of excess abstraction in his Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness.
"Thousands of years ago the major problem was getting the fire lit. Now it has to do with reducing carbon emissions. The economy had to do with getting and hoarding gold. Now it is about QE2 and the derivatives market"
Preicisely, amazing how one thing leads to another when one is simply following one's scientific nose. For centuries it has been perhaps understandable to pursue this line of thought, but we have come to a time, past time, IMO, when we need to realize that a continuing, unthinking dogged pursuit of this same process is leading us over a cliff.
And you do not consider that perhaps it is the complexity of derivatives to the point where their utilizers, if not even their inventors, don't understand them, given the fiascos they have produced, that militates against their use? Do you really want to leave it to the "experts" who invented these things to decide whether or not they should be used? Well, we did just that, now didn't we, and what did they decide, and how did that turn out?
As for intentionality - if it hasn't occurred to you that "complexification" of a process does, indeed, produce an elite and while there are some processes that one could argue are, in fact, by their nature, unavoidably complex, though perhaps not as many as we are led to believe, it has occurred to many others that "complexification" of simple processes, while unnecessary, pays off handsomely for those who can achieve it.
"You don't really believe Imhoff can pull his own scientists out of a hat, do you? Real ones?"
He already has.
"Scientists and other professionals are not at fault for the misuse of technology"
Science is an amoral pursuit - what it can conceive it somehow feels the obligation to try to produce. The A-bomb is a perfect example. Someone, outside that discipline, has to be able to tell it "NO" and the guidelines for yes or no need to be laid out in the process of discussions with and the consent of, or in the name of (as with progeny,e.g.) those who will be affected. This is a discussion that scientists are not trained in - they are trained to pursue what could be done and in fact, by inclination they are inclined to define what "should" be done as co-terminal with what could be. I suggest the the precautionary principle, which should, IMO, be the guiding one for human activity, is, in many ways, anathema to many scientific endeavors. As for the "science" of economics, well, the results of listening to those "experts" speaks for itself, I would say .... The fact that it is "politicians" who decided on the (mis)use of the products of various sciences tells me that our failure is not in replacing "politicians" with scientists, but in our failure to choose better politicians!
You are asserting that scientists would necessarily make better decisions about the use of their discoveries than "politicians", a point you have yet to "prove", and a point I dispute, for the reasons above ....
"They (rightfully, in my opinion) imagine there are other domains within a single human life they wish to explore."
Amen to that! But they also (rightfully, in my opinion) have the right (and the obligation) to participate in, and make decisions concerning, the social, political, and economic milieu within which they have the freedom to explore those domains .....
I am afraid the "complexification" is here and there is nothing you can do about it. It comes from the application of human intelligence and there is no holding that back. Broad concepts--like "criminal class" (to take one from the nineteenth century) get broken down into finer categories: sociopaths, psychopaths, those who commit crimes of passion or avarice, those who commit crimes impulsively, the criminally insane. We make finer and finer distinctions--and how can that be bad? You may grieve for the passing of broad concepts everyone understood, but those days are long gone. Would you like to have doctors treat you with bloodletting? The four humors, after all, were an easy to understand paradigm (but not correct). No, I would take the professional to make the best decisions in medicine--and in economics and the environment, too.
"Complexification" and making fine distinctions are two different things - apples and oranges, as they say. Are derivatives simply the result of the process of making distinctions?
"No, I would take the professional to make the best decisions in medicine--"
Poor fellow ..... spend a couple of decades in the field and then tell me if you feel the same ...
"and in economics"
So you are a Grteenspan, Summers and Geithner fan? A Friedman fan? A Keynes fan? Which "expert" do you trust?
Well Drosera the major problem for a big part of humanity is still to light a fire. In our conversations we tend to forget that for billions of poeple life is still about basic things, like food, drinking water, a shelter and the fire to sustain all that. Before being mad at me let me tell you i lived in India and Nicaragua for a long time so i kind of know about the problems facing the huge silent portion of humanity we never really engage in our debates.
I cannot deny what you say. Still, the original argument goes back to the relationship between governance and the nature of problems we face today: I say the problems emerging from modern society are too complex for ordinary people to make intelligent decisions about; Arnold says democracy can deal fine with them, no matter how complex they are. I think that people are easily manipulated by propaganda and the media; they have no knowledge base to oppose reckless schemes perpetrated by politicians, schemes that threaten the very lives of voters. Professionals--those trained in disciplines--make better leaders than politicians selected through the influence of big money.
I understand what you are saying Drosera and i even agree with it however using the elite paradigm (basicaly the manipulation, propaganda, the consumer choices...)we denie how humanity really is; animal, dependent on few basic things for real. Democracy is not the problem it is but a system of living together, we are the problem, we've been bought by commodities, conforts, humanity became a concept detached from the living (organic) world,as is what is it for us that the cheap whatever we buy is made by people not earning a living wage or worst(huh) by forced labor, kids in sweat shops and on and on... what's going on in the "developping", third world we lived it, we industrialized poeple through and through in a not so long gone history and then we forgot... Not once on this thread did i see anybody talk about solidarity, globalized solidarity, just our western conundrums. we talk about fighting for what we are afraid to lose never about what other should have...
The problem is not that the professionals are striving for "efficiency," the problem is with regard to what they are trying to efficiently achieve. If they were trying to efficiently improve the general welfare and the long-term prospects for human survival, address global warming, and increase the median or mean quality of life for people on the planet, that would be great. But they are hired by the plutocrats to increase the efficiency at which power, control, and money flow to the plutocrats, all at the same time creating fuzzy terminology and disingenuous explanations that act as a smokescreen to obscure what they are doing.
Absolutely. This is a good addendum to clarify an otherwise perceptive article.
"the problem is with regard to what they are trying to efficiently achieve."
Thank you! The lauding of "Efficiency", when unquestioned as to what end it is directed toward and whether that is a desirable end to achieve, would result in obvious praise for Hitler's gas chambers - after all they were cheap, requiring few materials or manpower, quick, and quite productive - the very model of efficiency. Only when we look at what they "produced" do we realize that "efficiency" in the service of this "process" was, in fact, a curse .....
Don't know if you have read it, but a good book, IMO, along these lines is "Dirty Rotten Strategies - How We Trick Ourselves and Others into Solving the Wrong Problems Precisely" by Mitroff and Silvers. (Dumb title, in my estimation, but a good read, nonetheless)
Here is an example of 'facing the full costs of their medical decisions'. Would you require your health insurer to spend as much as a half million dollars or more keeping you alive for a few more months than you otherwise would have lived? You are told that you have cancer. It is not curable but you can be kept alive for a few years or a few months at enormous expense. You feel that a few more months with your loved ones is worth every penny. But...you would not ask your family to sell all their belongings and go into deep, deep debt to pay for those extra months. No, you don't have to ask that because you have health insurance. Let the health insurer fork over the money even if those last few months or weeks cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. More and more people are doing just that and it is resulting in ever increasing cost of insurance.
Damn right, I DO want insurance companies to be required to fulfill their obligations to their subscribers, even if it means paying out to keep someone alive "for a few years or a few months at enormous expense." They have to "fork over the money," as you put it, because the subscriber "forked over" his insurance payments just in case he got cancer and needed expensive care. That's what "insurance" is about.
It might be easier to understand if you think of a casino. Mostly, the house wins, even though someone hits the jackpot once in a while. And mostly the insurance company wins, because most people don't get sick enough to need expensive care. The insurance companies are making out like the bandits that they are:
From http://thinkprogress.org/2010/03/09/zirkelbach-profits/
Insurers skim off 15-20 percent of premium dollars for administrative costs and profits which fund TV ad campaigns, Washington lobbyists, lavish company retreats and outlandish CEO salaries.
The top five earning insurance companies averaged profits of $12.2 billion, an increase of $4.4 billion, or 56 percent, from 2008. And in 2008 (the last year for which data was available), CEO compensation for these companies ranged from $3 million to $24 million.”
Insurer profits increased even in the midst of the current recession. Last week, during a hearing before the House Energy and Commerce Health Subcommittee, WellPoint admitted that it increased premiums to keep up with medical costs and maintain a 2% profit. The company’s 2009 fourth quarter net income “was more than $2.7 billion, a 727 percent increase from the fourth quarter of last year” — even as membership declined by some 4 percent.