Insurers Now Out to Sink Healthcare Reform

By Karen

“Hatchet job” was Senator Max Baucus’ (D-Mont.) assessment of the report just released by lobbying group America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP). Makes you wonder why he’s killing himself trying to protect their profits at our expense.

AHIP claims Max’s plan would raise rates — by $1,700 for families and $600 for individuals — by 2013.

So what’s their point? Without reform, rates routinely increase more than $600 every year.

Obama should feel the knife sticking out of his back while AHIP’s head cheerleader, Karen Ignagni, smugly hints that TV attack ads may be coming. The sheer gall of this complete 180 would be mind-blowing if we weren’t talking about the most useless, greedy, wasteful industry ever conceived.

But perhaps insurers just did us a favor. Cornered, maybe Congress will finally consider the only means guaranteed to reduce costs — HR3200 or HR676 — single-payer plans that make insurance obsolete.

Who could possibly care about the future of an industry that just denied a policy to a 4-month-old baby for the “pre-existing condition” of being fat?

Nobody wins with insurers. When rising premiums forced me to become underinsured this year, I got my prescriptions filled by Target instead of Anthem’s mail-order pharmacy — and guess what? Anthem had been overcharging me, selling a 90-day supply of my meds for $36 that Target sells for $20.

Target initially submitted its charge to Anthem, which Anthem immediately denied, but they said I could only have a 30-day supply.

I basically told Target, “F**k Anthem. Give me 90 days and don’t tell them.”

That means my prescriptions don’t go toward my $2,250 annual deductible and Anthem wins in the end. But I’ll be damned if they’ll dictate terms while not paying a penny.

Insurers planned to sink reform all along. With a clear conscience, Obama and Congress should respond to this duplicity by establishing universal, single-payer healthcare.

Oslo to Obama: No Pressure!

By Yul

Nobody saw it coming — Norwegians putting Obama’s feet to the fire with a tongue-in-cheek Nobel Peace Prize. Don’t get me wrong. I’m happy to see my fellow black cat win a prize, but that one? For what?

It’s still business as usual in Iraq, and if Obama heeds his generals, things are about to take an ugly turn in Afghanistan.

For a change, everyone seems to agree on one thing: Obama was recognized mainly for not being George W. Bush. On the other hand, the day the Nobel was announced, we hauled off and bombed the moon.

Looking for ice. Yeah, whatever.

Obama is increasingly much talk, little action. Just ask gays. Or people waiting for deliverance from the scourge of private health insurers. On that score, Obama hasn’t just taken a backseat to Congress, he’s locked himself in the trunk. It’s become blatantly obvious that health insurance “reform” is all about protecting insurers’ precious profits. Any change that would actually reduce cost and waste — the private option, expanding Medicare, single payer — is DOA.

But will Obama be able to end Bush and Cheney’s wars? Will he de-nuke Ahmadinejad and get the Middle East to accept Israel? Will he ever get Americans to stop screaming and making themselves look foolish to the rest of the world?

I’m guessing not, and Obama will someday be hiding the Prize in a closet, but you have to applaud Norway’s off-beat way of reminding our president that talk is cheap and results would be nice.

Mixed Emotions on Obama’s Healthcare Speech

By Karen

“I will not stand by while the special interests use the same old tactics to keep things exactly the way they are. … Not this time. Not now.”

Obama said many things right, but tip-toed around the sacred cow in health reform: insurance company profits. He vowed to cut “waste” elsewhere, but the hundreds of billions we squander each year on insurance industry profit is the biggest waste of all.

By ignoring the only viable, affordable solution — single payer — and even waffling on the public option to appease Republicans, Obama would throw us to the lions, using tax penalties as a threat to make us all customers of private insurers.

It was great when Obama smacked down as “a lie, pure and simple,” Sarah Palin’s preposterous assertion that he’s proposing death panels. But I doubt we’ll ever see the day when all insurers cover preventive care, don’t exclude pre-existing conditions, don’t cap lifetime benefits, don’t cancel people on a loophole when they get sick, and don’t limit out-of-pocket expenses.

All these things would erode insurance profits. And now that Obama’s given away the rest of the farm on reform, these are the next items undoubtedly headed to the chopping block as Congress continues trying to keep insurers happy.

For Obama to claim that establishing “exchanges” will suddenly make us be treated fairly by the very companies that ritually fleece us, he’s just playing us for fools. As fast as Congress dreams up laws to curb insurer abuses, insurers will find workarounds, just like credit card issuers are doing.

Americans are being set up to get screwed like never before.

We need to forget about health insurance reform and refocus on healthcare. Health insurance is an obsolete concept, the main obstacle to care. As long as our president refuses to face this fact, which is known by every other country that provides healthcare to every citizen without a vast insurance bureaucracy, we’ll never solve this problem in the U.S. and people will continue to go bankrupt and die.

Scowling Republicans, sitting on their hands like a bunch of brats during Obama’s speech, demonstrated that they value human life as little as the terrorists they love to vilify. Such closed minds should forfeit any role in a fix, and I hope Obama follows through on this promise:

“I will not waste time with those who have made the calculation that it’s better politics to kill this plan than improve it. If you misrepresent what’s in the plan, we will call you out. And I will not accept the status quo as a solution.”

But I’m wondering just how little change Obama will eventually settle for and call it a solution.

To: Health Insurance Reform Opponents

By Yul

Obama has stumbled into a vortex of insanity while battling the forces of greed in healthcare. To anyone who has, or plans to, act up at town hall meetings, let’s talk about you for a minute…

Since you don’t think anybody needs affordable health insurance, I’m guessing you already have it yourself. And you got it at work. And your employer negotiated with a few insurance companies, without any help from you, to get the best deal. Then it was handed to you.

You had no say in picking your insurer. Oh, sure, you may have been given a couple of choices, but your employer made the choices.

Lots of companies choose HMOs because they’re cheaper, but only if you see doctors in the network. So you don’t really get to choose any doctor without paying through the nose out-of-network.

Since your employer probably subsidizes your premium to keep you from going into sticker shock, you mooch off someone else to avoid paying full price.

If you’re young and healthy, you may not realize this yet, but your insurance doesn’t cover everything. Just wait until you get real sick and your doctor recommends some promising, yet still experimental, treatment that could probably save your life. Your insurer will probably deny the claim — ration your care.

So what’s your beef with Obama trying to help others get decent healthcare through the government without all the games? Unlike you, they’d pay for it entirely themselves, and insurance companies wouldn’t have power over life or death.

You must be a special kind of stupid if you think anybody in Washington is cooking up “Death Panels” or planning to euthanize old people. Those ideas might have floated in the PREVIOUS administration, when life was cheap. Remember? It’s no coincidence that the people spreading these incredible lies worshipped the last administration.

Unless you have dealt directly with an insurance company to buy your own policy, and you pay for it entirely on your own, you have no clue what this debate is all about. You’re a sheep taking marching orders from liars and revealing yourself to be ignorant, selfish, and cruel.

In the end, you won’t win. Evil never does. This fix needs to happen.

Obama Signals He Gets It on Healthcare Reform

By Karen

I’ve been worried that President Obama intends to throw us all under the bus of private health insurers by mandating we buy their shoddy policies, but he sent the clearest signal yet during his press conference the other night that he really does get it.

And no one in the clueless media picked up on it, though it knocked me off the couch. They’re too preoccupied with the next hot scoop on the late Michael Jackson, I guess.

The signal came in the first words out of Obama’s mouth:

“Good evening. Please be seated. Before I take your questions, I want to talk for a few minutes about the progress we’re making on health insurance reform and where it fits into our broader economic strategy.”

In his opening remarks, he called it health insurance reform three more times. And not one hotshot reporter in the room picked up on the subtle shift in emphasis. In fact, they all kept calling it “healthcare reform.”

Here’s the difference: Reforming health care implies making medical practices, doctors, and hospitals do things differently. Yes, we need some of that, too, but they’re not really the problem. They’re victims, just like the rest of us, only trying to protect themselves.

What everyone in Washington hasn’t dared to say until now is that we need to reform health insurance. To end the extortionist, discriminatory practices that have enabled health insurers to thrive while their customers go bankrupt over medical expenses the lousy insurance they’re buying won’t cover.

Obama has talked about how his mother fought with her insurance company while she was dying of cancer. I was afraid he’d put that behind him, but now I know it’s only because he can’t speak the truth without committing political suicide.

The truth is that the insurance industry has health care in a death grip. Unless that grip is broken, doctors and hospitals will continue to squander fortunes on bureaucracy and patients will continue to face financial ruin and die while paying insurers through the nose for a product that refuses to deliver.

Let’s just hope Obama can persuade enough members of Congress to hop off the lobbyist gravy train fueled by our insurance premiums and do the right thing for once.

Washington Set on Botching Healthcare Reform

By Karen

Our legislators reject single-payer healthcare as “too drastic” a change for the country (Translation: Too simple and ethical for them to make a buck from), so growing numbers of single-payer advocates are yelling “Foul!”

One word explains why any plan continuing to be based on private health insurance won’t work:

Profit

Every penny wasted on insurance company overhead and bureaucratic requirements doesn’t go to medical care.

To preserve the status quo, insurers recently offered to forgo $2 TRILLION in future profits. That’s chump change to them. They’re admitting they’re already rolling in dough by cherry-picking, charging extortionist rates, and denying claims.

Two single-payer bills, HR 676 and S 703, languish in Congress while our representatives sit mesmerized by insurance industry snakes promising “fixes.”

The other blunder Washington’s intent on making  is to keep employers involved. That’s what they mean by, “You can keep the plan you like,” because virtually no one in the individual market has coverage that’s both adequate and affordable.

Instead, employers should contribute to a national program where workers can access affordable, portable healthcare. Corporate America instantly escapes the administrative hell of dealing with insurance companies, and employees no longer have to stay in jobs they hate just for the health benefits.

Characterizing single-payer as “free” or “socialist” is deliberately ignorant.

NOBODY says it will be free. Hundreds of billions now wasted on bureaucracy and profit will be rechanneled to actual medical care.

Republicans oppose Obama’s public option to give individuals and small businesses a break because they’re afraid private insurers will languish.

Exactly. Any industry whose success depends on providing NOTHING needs to die. The only ones entitled to profit from medical care are care providers. They earn it.

Sen. Tom Coburn, MD (R-OK) outlines the Republican proposal, which sounds fine if you think 50 new state bureaucracies in bed with private insurers are better than one federal agency that isn’t.

The Seattle Post Intelligencer lays out all the players and their plans. You need to watch this issue closely because whatever Congress does when it’s finished dithering will affect you and your family — guaranteed.

Insurance Lobbyist Karen Ignagni Stops Advocating Screwing Women

By Karen

Pro-private-insurance trade group America’s Health Insurance Plans(AHIP) has dangled a new carrot before Congress, using self-employed women like me as pawns to kill any chance we’ll ever see affordable government-sponsored or single-payer healthcare.

Last November, AHIP president and CEO Karen Ignagni began trying to derail healthcare reform by offering to stop cherry-picking customers so only the healthiest and least likely to need it could qualify for individual insurance.

In March, she offered to stop charging ill people more, but quietly replaced illness with age as a reason to jack up premiums, disingenuously slipping insurers a means to hit everyone with hefty annual rate increases, ill or not.

Now, in the individual market where insurers can get away with anything, she’s admitting they typically charge women 25-50% more than men as punishment for having uteruses.

Ignagni now agrees with Senator John Kerry (D-MA) that screwing women is wrong and is offering “not to recommend continuing it.”

Senator Kerry, with all good intentions, has naïvely introduced a bill to prohibit insurance companies from using gender to set premium rates. But he’s just playing into insurers’ hands because they’ll simply increase men’s premiums to match women’s.

Can you say “Ka-Ching!”?

Congress, instead of rewarding the AHIP’s duplicity with lame “reform” that throws all Americans into the insurance pool to be devoured by these sharks, you need to recognize these tactics for what they really are:

Bold-faced admissions of an industry’s longstanding unethical practices and unconscionable discrimination for profit at any cost.

The only civilized response to “deals” like these is to shove universal healthcare bills HR.676 and S.703 down Karen Ignagni’s throat and eliminate all such double-talking, self-serving, useless leeches from the equation.

P.S. If anyone out there thinks you can scare me with “rationing,” go get yourself some individual insurance, visit a doctor, file a claim, and see how much of it, if any, gets paid. THAT’S rationing. We have it right now, thanks to the insurers Ignagni represents.

Putting Nancy Pelosi on Notice RE: Healthcare

By Karen

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi outdid herself for smug ignorance at a recent Christian Science Monitor event, infuriating supporters of single-payer universal healthcare. She said…

“As our members came back from their recess, a great deal of what they heard out there was public options, public options, public options, public options. In our caucus, over and over again, we hear single payer, single payer, single payer. Well, it’s not going to be a single payer. … We had an opportunity for that awhile back, and it was not realized. And that’s not what it’s going to be. So we had to take people from a place that they see universal, affordable, quality health care available best in single payer and say this can be achieved in other ways.”

Pelosi can ignore the will of the people because she’s already got what we want — government-sponsored healthcare. Yeah, WE pay for it so she can sit in Washington and help her insurance buds screw us.

Private health insurance is based on making a profit from premiums by providing little or nothing in return. Denying claims and rescinding policies are used as employee incentives for personal bonuses and to boost the bottom line.

Because lives are on the line, it’s morally indefensible. Yet these are “the other ways” Pelosi coyly refers to.

Why is she so keen to protect health insurers? Because they’re generous campaign contributors — bribing politicians with OUR health insurance premiums. Eliminating them would mean hundreds of billions instantly freed from bureaucratic waste and political corruption for medical care.

Any politician who refuses to consider the single-payer option is really saying,

“Your healthcare expenditures should continue to be wasted or end up in my campaign coffers. To hell with you and your family’s medical needs.”

Two bills for universal single-payer care, HR.676 and S.703, now sit in the House and Senate. If one of them, or something similar, doesn’t pass, then we need to wipe Washington clean in the next election of every politician who puts insurance company profits above constituents’ health.

Gas is Down, but Health Insurance is Up – Again

By Karen

Anthem must be missing all the reports that the economy’s in the toilet and money’s tight because they didn’t think 87% profit on my health insurance in 2008 was enough. They’ve raised my rate for 2009 another 14%.

Here’s a simple breakdown:

In 2008, I paid $4,646 for an individual policy.

For one office visit and the usual annual checkups and tests (which revealed nothing unusual), my doctors billed Anthem $1,491.

Anthem spit back $686, calling it “network savings,” and paid $594 — just 13% of my premium dollars.

I had to fork out another $378 in copays and charges Anthem denied.

Bottom line: Anthem kept $4,053 — 87% profit. Now they demand another $636.

An Anthem rep told me that my new rate is based on a statewide review of claims.

However, when I recently reapplied for their insurance (to reduce my ridiculous $488 premium), my personal medical history was dissected with a microscope as if I were the last person on earth as they tried to deny me. Now they’re lumping me in with every invalid in Virginia.

Apparently, Anthem can slice it any way it takes to boost their bottom line.

HR 676, the universal healthcare bill that would stake these vampires, is supposed to come before the next session of Congress. If you’re being gouged by your health insurer, I urge you to send the details to your congressman and senators ASAP.

Hearing that things are “bad and need fixing” isn’t getting through to Capitol Hill. We need to bury them under specifics on how the insurance industry is killing us – financially and literally.

They need to see voters’ names on this problem until they get it through their heads that for-profit health insurers can never be part of the fix.

We must make the putrid stench of health insurers’ greed permeate every corner of Congress until it sickens them enough to act in our best interests for a change.

And to keep Obama’s team on track, share your concerns and keep them motivated. They’re our best hope for implementing the drastic changes healthcare needs now.

Banks Take the Bailout Money and Run

By Fred

With breathtaking, yet unsurprising, arrogance, 21 banks who received more than $1 billion in bailout money refused to tell The Associated Press…

How much has been spent?

What was it spent on?

How much is being held in savings?

What’s the plan for the rest?

All we do know for sure is that the top 600 executives spread among the 116 banks who have received some money so far raked in $1.6 billion in salaries, bonuses, and whatever other perks they could grab in 2007, the year leading up to the current mess.

The same questions should be posed to those guys about their personal finances. If they can’t answer every one in detail, they have no business running a bank.

The banks claim these jerks need big bucks to reward their crackerjack judgment and keep them motivated.

Are they kidding? We’re talking about the judgment that sent them begging to Congress for a handout because they blew the assets they had like drunken gamblers in Vegas.

Any bank accepting taxpayer money that can’t account for it obviously has a glaring lack of oversight at the highest levels. Those executives — and the boards who picked them — should all be fired. Immediately.

Banking and insurance are two industries that collect cold, hard cash from consumers while providing precious few tangibles — often nothing, in insurance’s case — in return. When imposing higher interest rates and premiums and bogus fees failed to satisfy them, they brazenly robbed American taxpayers of $350 billion — so far.

Let’s hope Congress has the sense to slam the till shut on their fingers until these thieves get their greed under control and offer ways to get the U.S. out of the deep hole they helped to dig.