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Guarding Health is Not Their Business, But It is Ours
If for one moment anyone has the notion that for-profit health insurance companies are in the business of guarding the health (or wealth) of policyholders, that notion ought to be quickly dismissed in favor of the truth. For-profit health insurance giants guard profits.
I arrived outside the WellPoint annual shareholders meeting in a hotel in Indianapolis yesterday to be greeted by more guards (and some armed) than I have seen surrounding President Obama at times. Apparently just the prospect of having some of the legal shareholders question the business practices and ethics of the WellPoint board and CEO Angela Braly was very scary for the company and its elite leaders.
Some of the shareholders have in recent years put forward a resolution supporting WellPoint’s return to its non-profit roots. After last year’s meeting, the resolution earned 9.6 percent or 30,000,000 shareholder votes. The current leadership doesn’t like that nor do they like the efforts of the shareholders who keep challenging them.
One shareholder asked Ms. Braly at yesterday’s tightly controlled and guarded meeting, as a sort of speakers’ “shot clock” counted down her speaking time, “Tell me, Ms. Braly, could you please explain what you do that warrants a salary ($13.5 million annually) that is more than 375 public school teachers in Indiana earn?” Braly’s answer was a classic. No shot-clock running for the CEO as she explained that the board sets her compensation and it has to be competitive with the other comparable giants in the insurance industry. It is a breathtaking demonstration of greed and hubris.
I wondered how we have allowed this country to amble onward to the point where 1,275 Americans who carry health insurance go bankrupt every single day (if the courts stayed open seven days a week) while an insurance company CEO like Angela Braly pockets $140,000 for her day’s salary. Every day.
That’s quite a lot of money that doesn’t go to healthcare. That’s quite a lot of money for one person to earn in one day. That may be why such scary guards are needed outside WellPoint shareholder meetings – they wouldn’t want CEO Braly to have to mix it up with any of the policyholders or others who might question too directly what value the for-profit health insurance industry adds to the U.S. healthcare system. I also wondered how much money those guards cost. And the shot clocks to keep pesky questions to a minimum? And how about the pro-Angela and pro-profit softball questions planted in the room?
WellPoint, like the other major insurance giants, can claim the best profits ever this year. Times are good at the top. Things are not so good for millions of Americans who want for decent healthcare within a system that provides a progressively financed, single standard of high quality care. Medicare for all would be nice. The American Health Security Act of 2011, S915/HR1200 as offered by Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-VT, and Rep. Jim McDermott, D-WA, provides a model for moving forward. Public financing (yes, a single payer system) coupled with public and private delivery (not a single provider). No insurance giants paying huge board compensations and CEO salaries. No armed guards protecting the profit.
Outside the City Market in Indianapolis, in the rain and with no need for guards, the advocates of healthcare sanity gathered – and I was thrilled to be among the Hoosiers for a Commonsense Health Plan. We affirmed our commitment to the work ahead and to one another. We sang. We are shareholders in a society that values more than profit – we value behaving justly and humanely, and we’d like a healthcare system that reflects that.
Forgive my repetition of the theme, but health insurance is not healthcare. Health insurance is a financial product. Health insurance is a financial product sold to protect health and wealth which may well do neither. Health insurance is a defective financial product for millions of people who made what we felt were responsible decisions about protecting ourselves and our families from financial or health disaster with health insurance products that have loopholes and flaws big enough to leave thousands dead every year and hundreds of thousands bankrupt.
I will never have the salary or earnings of insurance CEOs like WellPoint’s Angela Braly. That’s OK by me because I’ll also, I hope, never need guards to keep those I have harmed and those I would harm from questioning me about why. But, my life and the lives of my loved ones, my neighbors and my friends are surely as valuable in terms of access to healthcare in America in 2011. The day will come.
16 Comments so far
Show AllDonna, you are just awesome. I love your articles. Keep it up; I feel like we're making some progress. Thank you.
Note also that Wellpoint continues to grow by acquiring regional insurance companies. The more companies Wellpoint buys, the higher the compensation packages the board and CEO will rationalize, and the sooner Wellpoint will become too-big-to-fail, enabling it to snag ever more taxpayer-funded corporate welfare.
"I arrived outside the WellPoint annual shareholders meeting in a hotel in Indianapolis yesterday to be greeted by more guards (and some armed) than I have seen surrounding President Obama at times."
Just look at how scared these greedy bastards really are. They know what they're doing is unconscionable, the bastards.
That one sentence stood out to me as well. Scared they should be...
They are mafiosi, cartels. Braly is a mobster.
Throw them all in prison where they belong.
This article is a seamless complement to Mary Bottari's "Robin Hood Storms Chase Castle and M&I Execs Get Piggish", which at the moment is posted immediately above this one.
It also features accounts of nervous, defensive plutocrats closing ranks and circling the wagons to keep We the People at spear's-length.
The plot thickens.
"Braly’s answer was a classic. No shot-clock running for the CEO as she explained that the board sets her compensation and it has to be competitive with the other comparable giants in the insurance industry. It is a breathtaking demonstration of greed and hubris."
I wish the next person to ask a question had said: "Ms Braley you did not answer the last question; you just evaded it. What do you do that the board thinks is worth that much money?"
If every other person asking questions had repeated that, she would have terminated the question section and moved on to "more important" things. Perhaps the local paper would have had a reporter there who wondered why.
Thank you Donna, for never giving up the just fight!
When I go to the dentist, the two dental hygienists (both working mothers) let me know that they pay ridiculous health insurance rates, and have come to see that these, added to their out-of-pocket expenses, make no sense whatsoever. (They know I have no insurance.)
I share this bit of anecdotal information because it shows that more and more people are realizing that so-called plans cost too much, cover too little, and do what they can to leave honest people--paying customers--in the lurch when genuine, if costly assistance, is needed.
Profit and the business model are anathema to any remote concept of providing health services to an aging population, especially one increasingly exposed to all sorts of carcinogens that their regulatory agencies are not regulating thanks to profit replacing justice in the operations of our nation's court system.
Even if Wellpoint reverts to non profit or more likely not for profit status the real savings which are to be gained from a Single Payer mechanism will not come close to being realized. It will still be private, employee based, underwritten to divide costs into different risk pools and still have all the excessively bureaucratic billing and accounting mechanisms both on the insurer and provider side which make our health care so expensive. The fact that sociopathic executives now skim obscene salaries off the top of for profit health insurance companies will only be slightly relieved if they are changed to not for profit status. Instead of paying dividends they will stow the money in surplus funds and still manage to be quite not for profitable and of course they will still continue to pay themselves handsomely. In fact these executives might welcome not for profit status. It makes them look more respectable and provides another cloak to obscure how they really do their dirty business.
Tammons, the last sentence you wrote is very insightful about the way these corporate executives think. My sister saw a lot of that type of thinking at the Red Cross before and after 9-11. I see that every year around Dec. 15th or so when I go to Sam's Club or Office Depot type places; anywhere the non/not for profits obtain supplies for their entity. They have to spend down in order to make the books look good. The overheard conversations are quite interesting, as it makes it clear that these items are not for their clients or for the direct functioning of their causes. It's to have really fun office parties and to treat each other to unplanned perks. And that's only the local higher ups, not the mid or higher level exec's. Looks like it goes to exponential increase with each layer of management.
Off the pigs!
A friend who can no longer work due to a health problem has no insurance. She has worked all her life and paid for insuance but now that she needs care she can't get it.
It is quite a scam these insurance companies have going, collecting all that money and then when the time to pay comes, well they aren't in buisiness to pay money out.
An improved Medicare expanded for all NOW. Sink the health insurance pirates.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bk23AtoTzMM&feature=related
I salute you, Ms. Smith: you are to the fight for health care what La Passionaria was to the defense of the Spanish Republic against the fascists.
But when O when will you recognize that obscene greed -- "armed guards protecting the profit" -- is merely capitalism in action.
And that "capitalism" is never more than a euphemism for "fascism."
Being your own physician, healing thyself, Take responsibiltiy for your own health and you won't need drugs that kill you.
Courageous work by Karen Stone and Donna Smith ! We need to start tagging the Insurance Industry as a “Death Row” institution. Their obstruction to providing needed health care to citizens is tantamount to placing innocent people on Death Row… I would rank Braly, Ignani, Hanway, et.al, on par with Hitler and his “Final Solution,” Stalin and his “No Man No Problem” approach, or Pol Pot. INTENT TO DESTROY: We should also make reference to this -- In 2007 the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), noted in its judgement on Jorgic v. Germany case that in 1992 the majority of legal scholars took the narrow view that “intent to destroy” in the CPPCG meant the intended physical-biological destruction of the protected group and that this was still the majority opinion.