CORPORATE CRIME REPORTER
Death
Penalty for the Health Insurance Industry
23 Corporate Crime Reporter 13, March 26, 2009
The private health insurance corporations are a de facto criminal conglomerate.
They are deserving of the death penalty.
Most of the western countries agree.
Years ago, they put the private for profit health insurance industry out of its misery.
Seventy-two members of the U.S. House of Representatives agree.
They have signed onto legislation, HR 676, that would make it unlawful to sell private health insurance for the basic health needs of the American people.
HR 676 would effectively apply the death penalty to the hundreds of private insurance companies and replace them with one single government payer.
According to recent polls, the majority of the American people along with the majority of doctors, nurses, health economists agree.
Who is opposed?
The private health insurance industry.
The pharmaceutical companies.
And their lackeys inside the beltway.
Obama and the Democrats are pushing a private/public partnership.
Today, Howard Dean is launching a new web site – Stand With Dr. Dean – that encourages people to sign on to a petition urging Congress to support a public option.
Don’t sign it.
It’s a halfway step that will just prolong the problem and the misery of the American people.
Dr. Stephanie Woolhandler and Dr. David Himmelstein of Physicians for a National Health Program say that the public plan option forgoes at least 84 percent of the administrative savings available through single payer.
“Even if 95 percent of Americans who are currently privately insured were to join the public plan – and it had overhead costs at current Medicare levels – the savings on insurance overhead would amount to only 16 percent of the roughly $400 billion annually achievable through single payer – not enough to make reform affordable.”
“A quarter century of experience with public/private competition in the Medicare program demonstrates that the private plans will not allow a level playing field,” Woolhandler and Himmelstein said. “Despite strict regulation, private insurers have successfully cherry picked healthier seniors, and have exploited regional health spending differences to their advantage. They have progressively undermined the public plan – which started as the single payer for seniors and has now become a funding mechanism for HMOs – and a place to dump the unprofitably ill. A public plan option does not lead toward single payer, but toward the segregation of patients, with profitable ones in private plans and unprofitable ones in the public plan.”
Public Citizen’s Dr. Sidney Wolfe agrees.
“As long as the private insurance industry is in the game, they will figure out ways to cause massive administrative waste,” Dr. Wolfe said. “The only way to have a feasible viable system is to get rid of the insurance industry.”
Wouldn’t a public option eventually lead to single payer?
No, says Dr. Wolfe. The same argument was being made in the 1960s – that the public option – Medicare and Medicaid – would lead to single payer.
It didn’t happen.
The death penalty is the only viable option.
Dr. Deb Richter, a Vermont doctor, agrees.
“If you keep insurance companies in the game, they are going to find ways to market to healthy people and leave the sick people to the public sector,” Dr. Richter says.
How?
Well, they’re doing it to Medicare right now.
For example, the HMOs advertise for healthy seniors on the second floor of health clubs with no elevators.
They cherry pick the healthy seniors and leave the sick seniors to Medicare.
“The insurance industry is a sleeping, but very vicious dog,” Dr. Johnathon Ross, a single payer doc in Toledo, Ohio, said last year. “You have a decision to make. You can either put a bullet in the back of its head. Or you can kick it. And Obama is going to kick that dog. That dog is going to wake up and kill his plan.”
There is a time and place for everything.
Including the death penalty.
The place for the death penalty is the private health insurance industry.
The time is now.
No to the public option.
No to Howard Dean, Health Care for American Now, Families USA.
No to the insurance industry.
No to the pharmaceutical industry.
Yes to single payer.
Corporate
Crime Reporter
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