I've been a fervent blogger at various times. Here's something I posted to my
blog of four years ago on American health care. It still says something about
why Obamacare had to be structured the way it was, and why there has been so
much opposition to it by entrenched American interests.
Ed
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The American Healthcare racket
Sunday, Aug 2, 2009
Friday evening is one of my favorite PBS nights,
yet I rarely get to watch TV then. There’s always something else to do like
having some good food and wine, sometimes with friends, sometimes at home and
sometimes not. But this past Friday, using the excuse of wanting to watch a
football game, I managed to find myself in front of the TV watching Bill Moyers
Journal.
Moyers dealt with health care reform. His guest
was Wendell Potter a former VP of a major US health insurer, CIGNA. Potter
had left CIGNA because he could no longer morally tolerate how his company and
other insurers were handling the health of Americans, and because of the kinds
of lies they were telling the public.
Many of these lies involve Canada, where
bureaucrats and not medical professionals are said to determine the kind of
health care people receive. That’s socialism, not something good, God fearing
Americans want any part of. As the politicians who support private insurance
typically argue, "you wouldn’t want a bureaucrat deciding on whether you
need treatment or not". Potter said that this is what they’ve been taught
to say by well paid lobbyists, and what they will continue to say because the
insurance companies help them get re-elected.
According to Potter, the insurance companies put
a lot of effort and money into lobbying politicians and getting them to take
stands on keeping health insurance in private hands. Health insurance is a
big and profitable business. As privately run, it can be manipulated into
ensuring
that shareholders and senior executives have lots of money coming their way in
dividends and bonuses.
Insurance coverage is typically obtained through
employment, although people can insure themselves if they can afford the
premiums. Given that many Americans are now losing their jobs, they are also
losing their coverage.
Manipulation of the insured is done in a variety
of ways, for example, deeming a certain illness ineligible because the claimant
had it as a condition prior to being covered by the insurer or because it’s at
some "experimental" stage and not to be taken seriously. What Potter
pointed out was that the less premium money the insurer has to pay out to a
claimant, the more the company retains as payment to shareholders and bonuses to
executives. Yes, it’s a racket.
Some 50 million Americans do not have health
insurance. The insurance companies would gladly cover them if they could pay
the required premiums, but they will die in the trenches to prevent government
from insuring them – agh! socialism!
To find out a little more about what’s at stake,
I rented Michael Moore’s "Sicko" and watched it this morning. Typical
of Moore, the
movie goes this way and that but generally confirms the kinds of things Potter
had said. It’s well worth watching even if you find yourself falling asleep
once in awhile.
My conclusion on all of this – thank God for
Canadian healthcare even if it is (good grief!!) socialism!
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