By Dave Lindorff
As the country contemplates a major reform and restructuring of the way we run our national health care system (if it can even be called that), it needs to be pointed out that the mammoth health insurance industry is nothing but a parasite on that system.
Health insurance companies add zero value to the delivery of health care. Indeed, they are a significant cost factor that sucks up, according to some estimates such as one by the organization Physicians for a National Health Program, as much as 31 percent of every dollar spent on medical services (a percentage that has been rising steadily year after year).
Insurance companies are damaging in more ways than simply cost, though.
They also actively interfere in the delivery of quality medical care, as anyone who has had to battle with some “nurse” on the phone at an insurance company to get required pre-authorization for needed procedure can attest. Just recently, the editor of a local weekly alternative paper in Philadelphia, Brian Hinkey, the victim of a near fatal hit-and-run accident last year who spent several days in a coma, and has been working hard to regain the use of all his limbs and faculties, reported in an opinion piece in the Philadelphia Inquirer on how his insurer after a few successful weeks of in-hospital rehab, denied him coverage for six critical weeks for out-patient rehab services, though every specialist on head injuries knows that early, consistent therapy is crucial to recovery of lost brain function.
This kind of human abuse is standard operating procedure for companies whose bottom lines are fattened the more services they can deny to insured clients. My own father, once doomed by a metastasized cancer following prostate surgery, was saved by a procedure offered by a physician in Atlanta that his Blue Cross plan in Connecticut refused to pay for. He had to finance the expensive treatment himself.
B’Man: My bitch is with Blue Cross Blue Shield, specifically, but they all work the same to screw over the public. I have experienced the very same things and worse in my family. I have had continual coverage with BCBS since 1996 (and maybe before). Since we started, it has constantly gone up in price, decreased in service and coverage and basically has penalized us for being an excellent customer. I am not surprised because these people are set up to make a profit. The problem is that when it comes to an American’s health, profit should not be the most significant goal (I would argue that it should be NO goal whatsoever). “Capitalism”, even the bullshit example our country claims to have is simply BAD for a human’s health. Period.
Now these medical system parasites are suddenly running scared, because it is clear that if everyone in America is to be guaranteed health insurance coverage—a promised goal of the new administration of President Barack Obama, and, according to polls, the desire of a large majority of the American people—they are going to stand exposed as a costly impediment to achieving that goal.
Insurance companies have managed to stay profitable and at least somewhat affordable to the private employers and workers who, together, have to pay for them, by denying care not just to policy holders, who are denied certain tests and treatments but especially to those who have known ailments, who are simply denied coverage altogether.
For decades, people with “pre-existing conditions” have been either barred from coverage, or have had to sign waivers that excluded them from getting coverage for treatment of those pre-existing conditions. In the worst case, which is all too common, people have ended up dying because they couldn’t get treatment for common and easily treated ailments like high blood pressure or diabetes.
B’Man: I have high BP (moderately) that is easily treatable with meds. However, the ignorant assed doctors seem to only listen to the drug salesman and will prescribe the “newest” drugs that cost a freaking fortune. Ask about the drug your granfather took (and worked very well) and you are met with stares of incredulity. I am supposed to prescribe the latest and greatest (most expensive, non-proven meds) that my trusty drug salesman told me about. Besides, he gave me these samples for you to try…
Then next month the bill says had you not had insurance, your month’s supply would equal about $250/month.
Now we hear that two big insurance trade groups, the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association and America’s Health Insurance Plans, have offered to “phase out the practice of varying premiums based on health status in the individual market” in the event that all Americans are required to obtain health insurance.
Well sure they’re doing that. If they didn’t, the government would force them to! The insurance industry, in saying that it would not price sick people out of coverage in a nationally-mandated health insurance scheme, is merely recognizing the political firestorm that would arise if it were not to do that, and were to force the sick and inform onto some government insurance plan, subsidized by taxpayers, while they just cherry-picked the healthy population, as they’ve been doing now for decades.
The whole point is that if everyone is included in the insurance pool, instead of only the healthy population, then the overall cost of being chronically or critically ill to the individual is spread over the whole of society. Premiums get adjusted accordingly.
Medicare is the model. Here we already have a government plan that covers every single elderly and disabled person.
If we were to simply extend Medicare to cover everyone in America, we would essentially have the Canadian model of health care (which, it should be pointed out, costs half what we pay in America for health care when private insurance and government programs are added together). As with current Medicare, the government would pay for treatment, with private doctors and hospitals providing the care, and with the government negotiating the permissible charges. That, in a nutshell, is what “single-payer” means—the government is the single payer for all health care. It doesn’t mean, as the right-wing critics claim in their scaremongering propaganda, that people would be forced to use certain doctors and certain hospitals. Far from it. That’s what private HMOs do.
B’Man: Again, this is my experience. BCBS tells me who I can see. But would you believe that many doctors are refusing to even accept BCBS of MS. We have some who simply say that it simply isn’t worth the hassle to take on those patients. BCBS has caused me and my family to drive over 7,000 miles last year for treatment, firstly because the local medical abilities just plain suck and if you plan on living, you better go elsewhere, and secondly because they limit many doctors in TN (I cannot switch from BCBS of MS to BCBS of TN… they act as if they are not connected and I would be treated for pre-existing conditions, etc. Basically, a move of 30 miles across the state line has caused them to treat me as a foreigner after all these years of continued service.
Medicare is efficient (only 3.6% of Medicare’s budget goes to administrative costs, compared to 31% for health care delivered through private insurance plans), its clients like it, and doctors and hospitals accept it.
We should not be tricked by this seeming sudden appearance of decency on the part of these corporate parasites. There is simply no valid reason for preserving the private insurance industry’s role in any health care reform plan that is aimed at giving everyone access to health care in America. The Obama administration needs to jettison its “free market” fetish when it comes to health care. The financing of health care for all Americans can all be handled much better by the government. Medicare has proven this. Other countries—Britain, Australia, France, Canada, Taiwan and most other modern nations have proven this.
Leave the insurance industry to handle our car insurance and our life insurance. It has no more place in the delivery of health care than do tapeworms in the digestive process of our bowels.
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DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. He is author of “Marketplace Medicine: The Rise of the For-Profit Hospital Chains” (Bantam Books, 1992) and most recently of “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net
Dave nails it as usual. To prove a point about “why” this is, again, “Follow the Money, Honey”!
From OpenSecrets:
Blue Cross/Blue Shield
Through its 45 local chapters, the Blue Cross/Blue Shield Association provides health care coverage to more than 80 million people. Blue Cross/Blue Shield also has a contract with the federal government to review and process Medicare claims. The association is lobbying Congress to make it harder for the government to penalize companies if their employees defraud the Medicare program and process false claims. Local Blue Cross chapters have paid about $340 million to the federal government to settle Medicare fraud charges since 1993.
Money given to campaign finance from BCBS
Members of a Senate Committee that today held the first part of a hearing to examine whether health insurance companies are failing to fully pay reimbursements to policyholders haven’t had any trouble themselves collecting money from these companies. In total, health insurance companies’ PACs and employees have given 25 members of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation $3.3 million in campaign contributions since the 1990 election cycle, with 53 percent of that going to Democrats*.
At the top of that list is committee member Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), who has collected $680,200 over time for his candidate committee and leadership PAC from the companies. But the industry under scrutiny has also helped pay for the campaigns of committee chair Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.), who has collected $141,000, while ranking member Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas) has brought in $119,700. Blue Cross/Blue Shield has the strongest financial tie to senators currently on the committee, giving $505,700 total, followed by AFLAC, which has donated $337,250 since 1989. Although none of the individuals testifying today were from a health insurance company (instead they were from various health care and consumer task forces and associations), UnitedHealth Group president Stephen Hemsley is scheduled to testify at the second half of the hearing on Tuesday. His company’s employees and PAC have given members of the committee $206,300, and Hemsley himself contributed to Rockefeller in the 2008 election cycle.
B’Man: No, Mr Redneck. Don’t follow the money. Don’t even look at the man behind the curtain. Just go along with it all until you are dead and bloated. And every one of these bastards who took money is being covered by the best healthcare that YOUR tax dollar can provide.
Fucking Sheople.
You should be outraged, but your gullibility and ass kissing of Barack Obama will not allow you to think, much less get angry.
BuelahMan
Lynda
drduhgylie
ConspiracyDude
TINMA
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