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A Second Look | Insurance Lobby Commits Malicious Misrepresentation, Raises Demand for Public Option (UPDATE)

Oct 12th, 2009
by Tom.
1 comment

UPDATE: Oct 13, 2009
via White House Office Of Health Reform Director “Blindsided” By AHIP Study

“The misleading and harmful claims made by the profit-driven insurance companies are politicking for corporate gain at its worst,” said Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va.

Democrats have reason to worry. Insurance industry opposition helped sink President Bill Clinton’s health care plan in the 1990s by fanning fears that people with coverage would wind up paying more.

Ignagni [Karen Ignagni, President and CEO of (AHIP) America’s Health Insurance Plans] was unequivocal in her support for the PricewaterhouseCoopers conclusions. The company is “a world-class firm” with “a stellar reputation,” she said.

The study projects that the legislation would add $1,700 a year to the cost of family coverage in 2013, when most of the major provisions of the Baucus bill would be in effect.

Premiums for a single person would go up by $600 more than would be the case without the legislation, it estimated.

In 10 years’ time, premiums would be $4,000 higher for a family plan, and $1,500 more for individual coverage.

The insurance industry has retaliated by issuing this threat to Congress and to the American people. They threaten to raise our insurance premiums by a huge amount if they don’t get every single thing they want, like a spoiled child. AHIP is crying over the weakening of the mandate for all to have insurance or face some penalty.  

The American people don’t react kindly to threats.

More information is required. I can see that our citizenry has become skeptic of facts and figures gathered by big corporations for the sake of big corporations, and rightly so. It does my heart good to see the pause, or the calm, from the heartland over this attempt by AHIP to intimidate them. Once the majority hears what Big Insurance is up to, the people will gather with torches and pitchforks. By issuing a threat to raise the premiums, AHIP has unwittingly given reason and support for the public option.

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via  Insurers Mount Attack Against Health Reform

WASHINGTON — The health insurance industry is warning that a comprehensive Senate bill would increase the cost of a typical policy by hundreds, or even thousands, of dollars a year after lawmakers eased up on the requirement that all Americans get coverage.

I got up this morning, got my coffee, checked some things on my blog’s dashboard, then started on today’s news when I found this article in the Huffington Post. It’s only 8:12 AM and I see that there is over 500 comments on this article already. This is the difficult part of living on the west coast.

I’ve read over some of the comments and I agree to the ones that say that the actions of AHIP and the insurance industry in general provoke the desires for the public option. They fan the flames when they threaten higher prices if they don’t get what they want.

…”It’s a health insurance company hatchet job, plain and simple,” said the spokesman, Scott Mulhauser.

It’s more than just an insurance industry “hatchet job”, it is an attempt to hold congress in duress. I interpret “hatchet job” as a malicious misrepresentation of the effect that the Baucus bill will really have on the treasury and our own purses.

White House health care spokeswoman Linda Douglass concurred. “This is an insurance industry analysis that is designed to reach a conclusion which benefits the industry, and does not represent what the bill does,” she said.

If the insurance companies hate it so much, then it has to be beneficial to the customer. The next move should be for Senator Reid to start talking up the public plan when consolidating the two bills. That would make the insurance industry SCREAM.

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/12/insurers-mount-attack-aga_n_317159.html

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A Second Look | Michael Moore Defines Us

Oct 5th, 2009
by Tom.
1 comment

(NEW! YOU CAN NOW POST COMMENTS WITHOUT REGISTERING AND WITHOUT AWATING MODERATION)

Michael Moore, Oscar and Emmy-winning director

via Michael Moore: For Those of You on Your Way to Church This Morning…
by Michael Moore, Oscar and Emmy-winning director, Posted on Huffington Post: October 4, 2009 04:59 AM

Friends,

I’d like to have a word with those of you who call yourselves Christians (Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, Bill Maherists, etc. can read along, too, as much of what I have to say, I’m sure, can be applied to your own spiritual/ethical values).

In my new film I speak for the first time in one of my movies about my own spiritual beliefs. I have always believed that one’s religious leanings are deeply personal and should be kept private. After all, we’ve heard enough yammerin’ in the past three decades about how one should “behave,” and I have to say I’m pretty burned out on pieties and platitudes considering we are a violent nation that invades other countries and punishes our own for having the audacity to fall on hard times.

There are some thousands out there who denigrate Mr. Moore at every opportunity. People call him names like anti-American and socialist, and media whore. People hate Michael Moore so much that there are blogs and bulletin boards galore on the web dedicated solely to hating him and slinging vitriolic hyperbole at him. There was even a documentary done back in 2004 that set out to prove the number one burning issue that must be on everyone’s mind and that issue is Michael Moore Hates America.

This is an example from Blogcritics.org of the vitriol aimed at Moore right after Fahrenheit 911 was released:

I started hating him when, in the immediate wake of 9/11, he pondered why it had happened. You see, in Moore’s world, this was a direct result of the Bush administration’s refusal to support the Kyoto Treaty. He wondered why the terrorists (freedom-fighters?) would attack New York, since that state went for Gore, and most of the murdered were likely Democrats.

Didn’t everybody? Ponder why it happened, I mean.

That leads me to the point. Indirectly, Michael Moore defines who we are as a nation. He doesn’t do it himself, but rather the multitude – the right-wing, hate-mongering, violence peddling, tea-bag crowd does it for him. America is not a peace-loving christian nation.

Those that compare the President of the United States to a monkey on tee shirts, a humiliating racial slur, and those that carry guns to events near the President define America as a lawless, barbaric society by their actions far more clearly than the questions that Michael Moore puts forth in his documentaries.

He brings these individuals out from under their rocks so they can hurl vitriol at him and therefore prove what he is saying – that we are not a christian nation, or any other religion for that matter. A christian nation would provide health care for the sick to everyone, even illegal immigrants, just because they are sick and no other reason.

This is who we are, a nation of barbarians and money grubbers, and Mr. Moore merely reflects these truths back at us. I guess that is why they hate him.

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A Second Look | Medicare For All? – Keep Dreaming

Sep 27th, 2009
by Tom.
1 comment

(NEW! YOU CAN NOW POST COMMENTS WITHOUT REGISTERING AND WITHOUT AWATING MODERATION)

via Medicare for All: Yes We Can | CommonDreams.org

by Holly Sklar, Published on Saturday, September 26, 2009 by CommonDreams.org

More Americans die of lack of health insurance than terrorism, homicide, drunk driving and HIV combined.

Grandma could be dead from lack of health insurance before she turns 65 and gets Medicare – 80 percent of first-time grandparents are in their 40s and 50s.

America is the only country that rations the right to health care to those 65 and older.

Lack of health insurance kills 45,000 American adults a year, according to a new study published in the American Journal of Public Health. One out of three Americans under age 65 had no private or public health insurance for some or all of 2007-2008…

…Even with health insurance, many Americans are a medical crisis away from bankruptcy. Research shows 62 percent of all bankruptcies in 2007 were medical, a share up 50 percent since 2001. Most of the medically bankrupt had health insurance – the kind insuring profits, not health care…

…Wendell Potter, CIGNA’s chief of corporate communications until quitting in 2008, testified to Congress, “The status quo for most Americans is that health insurance bureaucrats stand between them and their doctors right now, and maximizing profit is the mandate.” He said, “Every time you hear about the shortcomings of what they call ‘government-run’ health care, remember this: what we have now … and what the insurers are determined to keep in place, is Wall Street-run health care.”…

…Contrary to myth, the United States does not have the world’s best health care. We’re No. 1 in health care spending, but No. 50 in life expectancy, just before Albania, according to the CIA World Factbook. In Japan, people live four years longer than Americans. Canadians live three years longer. Forty-three countries have better infant mortality rates.

All these facts, all this red meat, and I can find no potatoes, no completeness.

You could put all this in a book, take the book to the halls of Congress, and smack every Senator and Congressman you pass on the head with it and you will not change their minds. It’s like telling the truth to an inquisitor. Unless it is what they want to hear, then it is all a lie.

Democratic Party leaders have this bone in their brain that compels them to think that if they don’t act like Republicans, no one will love them. Republicans have long been associated with helping the rich, and now the Democrats, the working man’s champions, are in that same boat. The solution to this convolution is obvious and it has two parts.

The first part, is that there is too much corporate money being passed to these politicians and their PACs. If we had national clean elections as does Arizona, which are a way to control the amount of money politicians spend on themselves to get elected, then politicians would be more concerned with representing the people and acting on the majority opinion than what their electoral prospectus ciphers out to be.

The second part is term limits. In this typist’s humble opinion, members of Congress should be limited to two terms of four years each, like the President, for both Senators and Congressmen. If this takes an amendment to the Constitution, then so be it. The drive to get reelected trumps the majority opinion – job preservation is the motivator behind making law and that should be a crime.

We can bask in the dreamy dream land of Medicare for all and sip our drinks by the pool in an idyllic setting, but the dirty, ugly, dusty, concrete truth is that there is nothing in that notion that would make the fat cats richer, so there is no political will for it.

…Tell President Obama and Congress, Yes we can have Medicare for All. Rep. Anthony Weiner’s amendment would substitute the text of the Expanded and Improved Medicare for All Act (HR 676), which has 86 co-sponsors, for House legislation HR 3200. Like the even worse Baucus bill in the Senate, HR 3200 would feed for-profit insurers more customers without providing the universal health care Medicare could provide at much lower cost…

Write and dial until your fingers turn blue. Nothing will happen. We did not elect Rep. Dennis Kucinich as President although he ran for it and we could have. We elected another DLC-like centrist who acts like he wants to be the head of both parties.

We could have elected Dennis, who wrote HR 676, if we had voted for him, but we were too caught up in the rapturous voice of change to think about our progressive dreams and who could take us there. We formed Barrack Obama in our image and projected on him the picture of a progressive savoir when all along, underneath it all, he was and is a fence-straddling centrist with his own agenda.

So go for it. Call every member of Congress, write them letters, send them email. I’ve done some of that. I’m still waiting. While you have them on the phone ask them what they think about limiting their own terms in Congress and limiting the money they can raise for reelection. You might get a laugh.

 

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