VIDEO: Insurance Companies Pass Landmark Bill

Come back tomorrow for Part Two!

Why the hell does the Insurance Industry support reform?

Democrat Led Health Insurance "Reform" might make things WORSE

by The Punk Patriot
So if you're a loyal Democrat, you're probably all riled up about the health insurance reform going on in congress. You're probably anxious for Congress to get something, ANYTHING passed. Not so fast there buddy. Health insurance reform, even if it's done by Democrats could end up making things WORSE, not better.

"What? How could this possibly be?" you might ask. Well...

It's old news by now that insurance giant Wellpoint, owner of Maine's Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield, is suing the State of Maine, to increase their profits. But you may not know the entire backstory: Anthem Blue Cross, in anticipation of the individual mandate for health insurance, has jacked up their rates 18% from what they were previously, jacking many people's premiums through the roof.

What may surprise you if you're not paying close attention, is that the Health Insurance industry is actually in favor of health insurance "reform." How could this be? Did they suddenly grow a concience, and decide that letting people die to increase their profit margin was wrong? Are they crying out to Big Government to regulate them like Sinners calling out to Jesus? "Please, Government! Save us from our own wicked nature!"

Not a chance in Hell.

It's no surprise that Wellpoint has run television ads in favor of the health insurance "reform" being pushed by Democrats in Congress. If the individual mandate becomes a final part of the bill, whether you can afford to or not, we will all end up having to pay these new increased rates, or face federal fines of up to three thousand dollars, depending on which version of the individual mandate ends up in the final bill.

Maine's state government has the power to regulate insurance rates. In light of this 18% increase, the State of Maine stepped in, and reduced the increase from 18% to 11%. So people's rate are still going up, and health insurance is still becoming less affordable. But that wasn't enough for the private insurance giant.

Last year Wellpoint made $2 billion in profits. In Maine alone, they've paid out over one million dollars in CEO bonuses. Rather than cut CEO bonuses to reduce their overhead, they are increasing their rates. Let's call a spade a spade. Wellpoint is essentially suing to ensure not their profit margin, but their CEO bonus margin.

So what's the deal here? Why are Congressional Democrats so willing to pass a bill that will essentially screw us over to benefit of the Insurance Industry? Easy. Follow the money. The health insurance is a powerful lobby, and one can accurately predict the level of a politician's support for the mandate, and for the Public Option, based on how much money was contributed to their campaign from the health insurance industry.



"But the Democrats are supposed to be on our side! It's the Republicans who are corrupt corporate sleazebags!" You might say. And yes, while the Republicans are generally corrupt, with lots of corporate donors, the corporate lobbyists who really run the show don't care about party affiliation. They care about who is in power at the moment. Right now, that's the Democrats.

That's why you find the Democrats in the predicament they're in. They have to satisfy the Private Health Insurance industry while making it look like they're achieving meaningful reform. They're playing a balancing act, giving the insurance industry exactly what they want, while still trying to fool their constituents into thinking that they're doing what's right.

Well, have they done their job?



Who owns your congressperson? Find Out: OpenSecrets.org

12 arrested in LA at Blue Cross

Los Angeles 10/15/09 – 12 arrested at the L.A. Anthem Blue Cross offices sit-in at as Maureen Cruise RN, public health care nurse, explains why single payer is not off the table. Along with a contingent of doctors at this recent sit-in, Cruise believes universal health care (a.k.a. single payer or medicare for all) is the only option. As Dr. Jo Olson told me, single payer is the only fiscal and moral solution. She has been working for a single payer system for the past five years. Nurse Cruise was an L.A. public health care nurse at numerous clinics until they all closed with the recent economic downturn. As she explains, 122 people die every day for lack of health care in the U.S. More die every day because they are denied health care from insurance companies despite paying their high premiums. People are forced into medical debt and foreclosure to pay for health care, unlike any other country. “What kind of country does this to it’s people?” she asks.

Nurse Cruise goes on to say that Pelosi’s announcement to the world that single payer is off the table was a ploy to make everyone forget about it and go for a public option instead, a public option written by and for the insurance industry, which spends over a million dollars per day lobbying Congress. The public option, as she says, is an insurance industry bailout, because with our economic downturn and the insurance industry’s annal retentive (my words) policy of raising rates to make up for losses, they are losing customers and so they look to the deep pockets of our government in the corporate welfare state we call America. But as long as we don’t have a viable health care system without the for profit insurance factor, and as long as we don’t have universal health care, people will continue to rally.

Keith Olberman Dedicates entire episode of Countdown to Health Care Reform

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Matt Taibbi: Wall Street Is Now Gambling on Grandma's Death

Full Article at TrueSlant.com

"Goldman Sachs has developed a tradable index of life settlements, enabling investors to bet on whether people will live longer than expected or die sooner than planned. The index is similar to tradable stock market indices that allow investors to bet on the overall direction of the market without buying stocks.

Spokesmen for Credit Suisse and Goldman Sachs declined to comment."

via Back to Business – Wall Street Pursues Profit in Bundles of Life Insurance – Series – NYTimes.com.

I’m sort of surprised that this didn’t get more attention. It looks like Wall Street is developing a new use for the securitization process — bundling life insurance policies and selling them as bonds to investors who would be betting, in essence, on when the policyholders will die.

The mechanism here is basically the same as the one used for mortgage-backed securities. Wall Street buys up life policies from elderly or ill people, who sell them for up-front cash that can be enjoyed before actual death (similar to those brokered arrangements with terminally ill HIV patients that received so much attention in the late eighties). They then take those policies and dump them into a securitized pool, where they can then be packaged as bonds and sold to investors who would get paid off when the policyholders die.

The mechanism works exactly the same as it did for MBS; in both cases the bank issuing the bond receives regular income in exchange for a promise to pay a lump sum when there is a “reference event,” which with mortgages is a default, but in this case would mean death.

What’s very amusing about this New York Times article is that, while describing this, there is no passage that reads anything like, “This utterly insane plan, which will condemn all those involved with it to an eternity of elaborate torment in the afterlife, is ironically being promoted by the very institutions that only just recently tried to destroy the world by creating similar casino-like gambits based on home ownership.”

The article does discuss the probable negative consequence that will come with a severe drop in the number of lapsed policies (until now, there were always a certain number of people who would let their insurance lapse either because they outlived their beneficiaries or could no longer afford the premiums; now, they will simply sell their policies instead of letting them lapse). The likely result here is higher premiums across the board for the ordinary person, which I suppose is an important point to consider.

But even beyond that… what the fuck??? This feels like financial innovation as practiced by Josef Mengele meets the Zucker Brothers; not just evil, but wacky evil. I don’t even want to think about what happens when Goldman Sachs suddenly has a large financial stake in the premature deaths of a bunch of old people. Where are the crazy police? Where is the crack federal crazy squad with the big butterfly net? I don’t know about betting on anyone’s life expectancy, but I think I’d like to bet on whether or not this idea ends well.

Full Article at TrueSlant.com

Anthem Is Sueing MAINE To Increase PROFITS

Netting $2.5 billion in profits last year wasn't enough for WellPoint, the nation's largest insurance company.

Now, WellPoint's affiliate, Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield, is suing the state of Maine for refusing to guarantee it a profit margin in the midst of a painful recession.

Forward this video to a friend in Maine!

Are you a 'Dead Peasant' ??

Dead Peasant Insurance-- a life insurance policy your employer takes out on you, naming themselves as the beneficiary. Meaning, your company profits when you die.

That's right. It's legal, and it happens all the time.

Read up:
Link 1
Link 2
Link 3
Link 4
Link 5

And here's a clip from Capitalism: A Love Story:



And even though this story broke a long time ago, ABC is surprised to learn about it from Michael Moore:

Obama's Speech: pros, cons, the nitty gritty of the public option

And now for something I NEVER do, an actual blog entry. Hey, videos take time.

SO:

The details of the Public Option are not new, if you've done any research on your own, but since most Americans haven't, it was nice to see the details laid out in Obama's speech-- though I think that with some of the new compromises, such as the trigger mechanisms to cut spending if cost savings aren't realized, if adopted, would pretty much doom the plan to fail. Which I think is the point. Private insurance is scared shitless right now, and they are doing everything they can to kill this thing (just like they do with 12% their customers every year).

The details of the plan, more or less, are as follows: The Public Option will be a non-profit insurance company, like the Postal Service is for mail, and will NOT be subsidized by the tax payer-- directly. If you can't afford the plan, then you will get a voucher to assist you to buy one, either from a private insurance company, or from the public option. While that sounds nice, it's a contrived way of routing government money into private insurance subsidies via the consumer. It wouldn't be so bad if the government simply subsidized people who could not afford insurance, or if they just gave anybody who wanted to sign up for Medicare, a Medicare card.

But with the mandate on the individual to purchase health insurance, (which the Republicans also support), everybody has to buy a plan, and so every citizen effectively becomes a way for the government to funnel federal money, through your forced purchase of a plan, to the insurance companies. This is supposed to drive down costs by increasing the market and spreading the risk across the whole of society, but I'm highly skeptical that it will have any effect. Afterall, the profit motive in insurance IS the problem, which thankfully Obama recognized, when he talked about the former CEO of an insurance company who talked about how insurance companies are rewarded for denying claims and denying care to the ill. But without pushing for Medicare for All, it's just a rhetorical victory on the part of progressives, not anything useful as far as policy goes.



The key reforms sought by Obama are as follows:

1) Make it illegal to deny claims based on pre-existing conditions.
2) Make it illegal to change the terms of the plan you purchase.
3) Create a health insurance exchange, through which Americans can do what Wal*Mart and Sam's Club does, which is use collective purchasing power at large volume to reduce costs to the individual.

Obama hedged on the cost, rather than saying one trillion, over the course of ten years, he said "over 900 billion" which sounds less scary, but means the same thing, which also isn't scary.
It is, as Obama was smart to point out, less than we've spent in Iraq or Afghanistan.

I thought it was sad that, even though the President dispelled the myths and disinformation that the Republicans have been spreading, the Republican response speech held afterward was to repeat the very lies and disinformation that were dispelled not ten minutes prior. Claims like "Medicare is going to be cut by $200 billion."

While it is factually true that within Medicare there will be a cut of $200 billion dollars, the cuts are coming from subsidies to insurance companies, which is wasted money. Medicare doesn't need to hire an insurance company to pay out doctor's bills. Medicare can pay doctor's bills on it's own, without losing money to an insurance company skimming corporate profits off the top on the way there.
What's more, is that this cut money is then being redistributed and then spent within the medicare program, so that the net effect is that there is no cut, and that rather than going to corporate profits, more money is going to medical expenses-- which is what Medicare is designed to do. So it's not actually a cut, but a reallocation of funds.

Republicans claim that there were many misstatements in Obama's speech. On that point I can agree. Obama said, "health insurance CEOs aren't bad people."
That is false. To run such a business, and to know that your decisions to increase your profits would kill 18,000 people every year, would require a total divorce with any human decency or sense of morality. Such a person would not be a good person by any standard I can think of. A good person would have a sense of human decency and a sense of morals, of right and wrong.

Another thing that upset me quite a bit, was when Obama mentioned that young healthy people choose not to purchase health insurance because they are willing to take the risk. FUCK THAT-- I don't have insurance because it's fucking expensive, and I'm broke as shit. I would LOVE to have health insurance. Sign me up for Medicare right now! Just don't criminalize my poverty, because I won't be able to afford to purchase one. My car just died, and I can barely afford to fix that, let alone make additional monthly payments on some private plan that is going to overcharge me, and then won't even provide any benefits when I need them. And the individual mandate, in effect, criminalizes poverty. That really sucks.

Obama said that he intends to be the last president to take up the issue of health care reform. I don't know what that is supposed to mean. These reforms are timid, the mandates are wrong-headed, and what's been put forth so far is certainly a far cry from actually fixing what's wrong with our health insurance market here in America.

I know that this isn't an important part of the speech, but it was thrilling to see the joint session erupt with protests from the Republican members of congress when Obama addressed head on the lies that have been propagated. I think the president should be required to speak at the joint session more often, like once a month, so that it would be more like the British House of parliament.
It was certainly a stark contrast between the Republicans protesting the lies being confronted head-on and dismissed tonight, versus the joint sessions that the Bush administration held after September 11th, and then leading up to the Iraq war, where everybody in Congress was silent. The Democrats sat idly by and were very quiet. No boos or disruptions. And that was when we were talking about killing people. Now we are trying to save lives, and the Republicans are hooting and hollering in protest, with one Republican from South Carolina yelling and calling the president a liar. An interesting contrast to note.

Republicans also held up pieces of paper, which I thought was a stupid form of protest, if indeed that's what it was. It made no sense whatsoever on the home TV. I'm sure THEY knew what the significance of those papers were, but nobody at home on their couches did. With the protesting and the hooting and hollering, they came across as having totally lost it, which they probably have. They were from the House, after all. There was one congressperson with a sheet of paper in his lap with the words written, "What Bill?" in large black ink letters. This one protest I thought was valid and does bring up a good point; there are currently something like six different bills, one of which is HR 676, another-- and the one that Democrats are usually talking about, is HR 3200. There are others as well, but they propose the creating of small co-opts that wouldn't have the bargaining power to lower costs like the health insurance exchange proposed in HR 3200.

Obama did a great thing with the last ten minutes of his speech, calling into question the idea that government itself is somehow un-American. It was a rebuttal to the anarcho-capitalist philosophy of Reagan and Goldwater that though meek, has been LONG overdue. There once was a time when Republicans ran on a platform increasing welfare spending, like Richard Nixon, or Dwight Eisenhower, for instance. Obama made an emotional and philosophical appeal, but I think it's one that is much needed for the sake of the public debate. If those sound-bytes are the one that end up being repeated over and over in the 24 hour news cycle, health insurance reform will be a cinch, and it will hopefully mark the turn of the tide away from that anarcho-capitalist, nonsense. Or as Evo Morales calls it, "Barbarian Capitalism."

Mad As Hell Doctors- Don't Support the Public Option, unless it's SINGLE PAYER

The Punk Patriot * WOODSTOCK TURNS FORTY-- and?

Could Woodstock have been organized on Facebook?

Punk Patriot * This week in News 7/16/9 - 7/23/9

Read the dumb shit I write:
punkpatriot.blogspot.com

Buy the dumb shit I make:
punkpatriot.etsy.com

Is the GOP racist?: VP of the Young Republicans, Audra Shay, fucks up real bad on Facebook

Wall Street: Goldman Sachs exceeds earnings expectations

More Wall Street: Morgan Stanley's "new" financial product

Greenwashing Beer: German Beer Brewers claim to have made Beer "good for the environment"

Corporate Douche-Baggery: Exxon sabotages their own wells and pollutes like a mother fucker

Nominal Things Obama is doing to make things suck slightly less: Obama wants to get rid of the Terror Alert Color Coded System

Wal*Mart: Wal*Mart supports employer mandate because they would gain an edge on the competition