Insurance companies callous pursuit of riches is startling

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Insurance companies callous pursuit of riches is startling
Arthur Salm, SDNN

In “Chinatown,” private detective Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson) is genuinely baffled by the greed of the already unimaginably wealthy Noah Cross (John Huston). Gittes cannot comprehend why the elderly Cross (a fictional take on the very real William Mulholland) would orchestrate a host of illegal activities - murder among them. When Cross says “The future,” he means securing an opportunity to become richer still.

Gittes is hamstrung by a lack of empathy: He really can’t put himself in this man’s Guccis. It’s like trying to understand why Anthem Blue Cross/Blue Shield has just announced rate increases of up to 39 percent even after reporting a fourth quarter (2009) profit of $2.74 billion. They’re doing it because they want more. They’re doing it because they can.

“They” being the appropriate word, since the Supreme Court has determined that corporations have the rights, if not the responsibilities, of people. But there is, in fact, a living, breathing “they” there, as Gertrude Stein probably would have had better sense than to put it. Officers of insurance companies, like their compadres in the banking world, live Noah Cross-like lives. They couldn’t possibly eat any better. There’s nothing that their $20 million, $30 million, $40 million salaries/bonuses/stock-option packages will allow them to buy that they couldn’t already buy with the goodies they received last year, and the year before that, and the years before that...

Yes, that means government-run health care. As in Medicare.

And let the howling commence: Socialism! To which I can but reply, damn straight. Socialized medicine. A lot of people find that frightening; after all, who’d want to live in a social democratic hellhole like, say, Norway or Denmark? But put the tarred word aside for a moment, and ask yourself if the average 55-year-old American wouldn’t like to become eligible for Medicare tomorrow. You know what he’d like even better? To become eligible for Medicare today. Then ask the average 35-year-old American how he’d like it. Then ask the average 25-year-old mother how she’d like it if she and her baby were covered by Medicare.

Read more: http://www.sdnn.com/sandiego/2010-02-10/columns/arthur-salm-columns/salm-insurance-companies-callous-pursuit-of-riches-is-startling##ixzz0fBEYMD6Y

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1. PRIVATE HEALTH INSURANCE MUST GO!

Here are just a few reasons why:

Bloody Hands. Private Insurers make self-
interested and arbitrary claim denials resigning
many subscribers to premature death.

Restriction of Choice. Private Insurers restrict
a medical consumer's choice in medical
providers, inhibiting the proper function of the
free market in medical services and enabling
bad providers to thrive.

Addition of complexity. Over 1,200 Private
Insurance bureaucracies complicate and
impede the practice of medicine with differing
and often conflicting billing and administrative
policies.

Draining of Resources. Nearly 30% of the
healthcare spending funneled through health
insurance middlemen is wasted on profit taking,
underwriting, executive compensation and other
unnecessary expense and waste.

Squandering of Expertise. Our current health
care model diverts providers' attention from
"how to heal" to "how to get compensated" by
the shameless insurers.

Manipulation of the Media. Private Insurers
maintain a level of editorial control over the
media via advertising purchases.


Corrupting of Our Politics. Private Insurers
manipulate elected officials with campaign donations,
plum corporate jobs, and an army of lobbyists.

Brainwashing of the Populace. Private Insurers
use paid media to lie directly to the populace,
leveraging fear tactics and other highly sophisticated
propaganda campaigns in order to evade
accountability for the consequences of their actions
and protect the status quo.

Rigging of the Debate. Captured media and
politicians to limit the debate to industry-blessed
healthcare-reform impostors and ignore genuine
reform.

No Salvageable Features. Reform proposals that
allow private for-profit insurers to persist are morally
unacceptable, fiscally irresponsible, and
unsustainable even in the near term. They are not
well-meaning "first-step" attempts at realism or
pragmatism by so-called centrists. They are a sinister
attempt to marginalize the opportunity our country
has at this defining moment to sideline the private
insurers and move to health care system that works
– publicly funded and privately provided Medicare for
all as implemented in HR 676 – The United States
National Health Insurance Act.