Your Tax Dollar: Better Used for Iraq or Health care?

B’Man: Our illustriously Bush suck-up leadership in Congress is spending your money again. They are taking your hard earned dollars, stealing the “taxed” portion, then spending that money on Iraq and the Military Industrial Complex’s insatiable need for more and MORE.

I wonder if you rednecks could think of a better way to spend our money than on an illegal invasion that you were lied to to accept and endorse? How about health care?

If someone were to ask you how to spend the money you give the government, would you select Iraq as the beneficiary? Would you select any freaking country or military base that wasn’t in America?

Neither would I.

Norman Solomon has an excellent article in which he suggests that our piss-poor health care system, totally dependent upon and financed through profit-driven motives, is a better investment than Iraq. If you disagree, could you take the time to explain why?

Fund Health Care, Not War

By Norman Solomon, AlterNet.

Speaking in a time of war, Martin Luther King Jr. said: “Somehow this madness must cease.”

Forty-one years later, young soldiers are returning to the United States from terrifying zones of carnage. The old claims of a justified war have melted away. So have the promises of a humane society back home.

Statistics about the war dead tell us very little about human realities. And familiar downbeat numbers about health care — 47 million Americans with no health insurance, perhaps an equal number woefully under-insured — tell us very little about the actual consequences or other options.

“The shocking facts about health care in the United States are well known,” Yes! Magazine noted in the autumn of 2006. “There’s little argument that the system is broken. What’s not well known is that the dialogue about fixing the health-care system is just as broken.”

That’s an apt description. For all the media focus and political rhetoric on health care, the mainline discourse is stuck in a corporate-friendly rut. But there are signs that a movement for a rational, humanistic health-care system in this country is now gaining strength.

A few hours after writing these words, I’ll be at a large demonstration in San Francisco. The lightning rod for this historic June 19 protest is a national meeting of America’s Health Insurance Plans, an outfit that cheerily pitches itself as “a national trade association representing nearly 1,300 member companies providing health benefits to more than 200 million Americans.”

As it happens, this meeting of America’s Health Insurance Plans got underway just as news broke that the congressional “leadership” has devised a formula to fully fund more war. “Democratic and GOP leaders in the House announced agreement Wednesday on a long-overdue war funding bill they said President Bush would be willing to sign,” the Associated Press reported. The bill would “provide about $165 billion to the Pentagon to fund military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan for about a year.”

There’s a lot of profit in death. Under the guise of national security. And under the guise of health care.

Today, across the United States, people are dying because they don’t have access to health care. But policy solutions are available. In Congress, about 90 co-sponsors are backing H.R. 676, a bill to provide “comprehensive health insurance coverage for all United States residents.” Call it whatever you like — “single payer” or “improved Medicare for all” or “universal health care with choice of providers and no financial barriers.” What it adds up to is the policy option of treating health care as the human right that it is.

In the latest edition of “Health Care Meltdown,” author C. Rocky White identifies himself as “a conservative Republican who has always held an entrepreneurial ‘pull yourself up by your own bootstraps’ free-market philosophy.” A longtime physician, White describes “the frustration I began to experience while trying to provide compassionate, quality health care in the context of a market in which the accustomed rules of business economics don’t apply.”

Dr. White immersed himself in research on health-care policy and finance. Then he pored through reams of the latest data on the tradeoffs of reform options. “No matter how I turned the cube,” he writes, “the answer never changed. That answer was nearly impossible for me, a free-market Republican, to accept.”

Here are Dr. White’s two key conclusions in his own words:

• “Until we remove the motive of profit from the financing of health care, we cannot and we will not resolve our current health care crisis.”
• “Any group that proposes reform policy that maintains the use of for-profit insurance companies in a so-called free market is being driven by one single motive — to protect the golden coffers of their share of the $2 trillion cash cow!”

Dr. White adds: “To continue down this road is paramount to suggesting that we privatize our fire and police services and turn them into for-profit organizations. You do that and people will die — just like they are dying now under our current health-care system!”

Grotesquely, the insurance and hospital industries at the center of health care in the United States are, in effect, profiting from priorities that condemn many people to death and many more to avoidable suffering.

Meanwhile, corporate enterprises continue to make a killing from U.S. military expenditures now in the vicinity of $2 billion per day.

During a wartime speech in 1969, the Nobel Prize-winning biologist George Wald said: “Our government has become preoccupied with death, with the business of killing and being killed.”

The preoccupation continues.

“When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people,” Martin Luther King observed, “the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”

Still, somehow, this madness must cease.

George Will: High Paid Idiot

The majority of Americans are better off now than they were in 2000/2001?

Really?

How about my fellow rednecks? Are you all better of financially? Even if you bring home more money, are you still better off?

George Will, the right-wing financial “genius” says that you are simply misinformed. That you don’t really know any better.

So let me ask you, are you the out-of-touch one, or is it Willy?

Big Meds and Big Insurance Spend $17 MILLION a Day to Influence Congress

B’Man: When the corrupt Congresspeople get their biggest contributions from Big Health (to a tune of $17,000,000/Day), you should not expect any changes to our healthcare fiasco we are dealing with.

$17 Million a Day to Influence Congress

Health interests dole out the dough to get their way

By Trudy Lieberman
Wed 16 Apr 2008 01:22 PM

On Bill Moyers Journal Friday night, David Beckmann, who heads the hunger advocacy group Bread for the World, recalled his visit with Senate Majority leader Harry Reid. Reid told Beckmann, “Look, I’ve been here thirty-five years. I think the two best organized interests in the United States are the insurance companies and the commodity groups,” meaning the people who produce corn, soybeans, etc. Reid said the obvious—that these special interests have very powerful friends on both sides of the aisle and it would be difficult to make changes in the commodity system that Beckmann was hoping for. Reid might well have added that it is also going to be really hard to change the American way of health care, a fact of life that the press is yet to truly illuminate.

A glance at what health insurers spent in the past year to get their way with lawmakers—mostly on one key issue—shows why. That issue may not be as sexy as the latest candidate gaffe, but it’s far more important. It is the question of continuing overpayments to insurance companies for their role in private Medicare Advantage plans.

A quick refresher: Medicare recipients can get their benefits from either traditional Medicare or from private Medicare Advantage plans, which in turn are paid by the government to provide the benefits. Last year the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPac), a neutral outfit that advises Congress, said that Medicare was paying sellers of these plans on average 12 percent more than it cost to provide the same benefits under traditional Medicare; it paid sellers of a special type of plan called private-fee-for-service plans 19 percent more. So a middleman—the insurance company—is getting a large cut. And for what, really? This year MedPac says the overpayments are 13 percent and 17 percent. And what is worse: the commission says these overpayments contribute to Medicare’s worsening long-term financial problem.

The insurance companies, of course, think the system is just fine, and they spent heavily to keep the status quo. Health Plan Week, an insurance industry trade pub, took a hard look, revealing that overall health insurance payments to lobbyists soared last year and are likely to grow again in the next couple of years as health reform becomes the biggest issue. A large percentage of that money, the magazine found, was focused on the Medicare Advantage issue, which was front and center last year. Analyzing disclosure forms from the Senate’s public records office, Health Plan Week found that fifteen health plans paid lobbyists more than $22 million in 2007, up from $18 million in 2006, a hefty chunk of change by any measure. WellCare Health Plans, a big seller of Medicare Advantage products that has gotten in trouble with regulators for its questionable sales practices, quadrupled its spending to $320,000 and paid half of that amount to the Washington law firm to plead its case on Medicare issues. Health Net and Tufts Health Plan more than doubled their spending, while insurance biggies like CIGNA and UnitedHealth Group substantially increased their lobbying budgets. Blue Cross and Blue Shield plans spent nearly $10 million.

The Health Plan Week story is instructive. It shows what money can buy. Given the millions that insurers spent, it’s hardly surprising that attempts last year to get rid of the overpayments failed. Meanwhile, predictions of even greater spending this year and next should prompt journalists to closely watch the Medicare Advantage story.

A press release just issued by the Center for Responsive Politics further reinforces the money and health care story. Its message: Special interests spent $17 million for every day Congress was in session, and the drug industry spent most of all, paying lobbyists 25 percent more than they did last year. Did Harry Reid forget to mention them? Drug companies spent some $227 million on lobbying activities. The insurance industry was right behind with $138 million, and not far down was the hospital and nursing home industry, which spent some $91 million. When the Center pulled apart spending by organization, Pharma, the American Medical Association, and the American Hospital Association ranked three, four, and five on its list of top spenders. It’s too bad that the Center’s latest numbers haven’t gotten more press. For they, too show, the rocky path ahead for health reform.

It’s easy for reporters and editors to dismiss yet another press release about gobs of money thrown at politicians and lobbyists. We’ve seen that before, they say; what else is new? And it’s easy to cop out and blame readers for stumbling over the big numbers anyway. But the big numbers tell a big story. It’s crucial to remind the public of the intersection of money, lobbyists, Congress, and the presidential candidates. “It’s a constitutional right to petition your government, but the average citizen is not doing this petitioning,” says Massie Ritsch, communications director for the Center for Responsive Politics. “The average person’s lobbyist is the elected official sent to Washington.” But, he adds, “Those officials are listening to the outsiders who are doing the petitioning.” The Constitution may guarantee lobbying, but it doesn’t say Congress has to listen to big money. The press needs to shine a light on just who is listening to whom.

B’Man: Oh, but then the media would have to stop its complicity in ravaging of Americans. Good luck with that.

There is but one clear answer and that is to cut the head off the middle man that serves no real purpose and is ONLY set up to make profits off the backs of Americans… the Insurance Companies. $.31 of every dollar spent on health related expenses is for the insurance companies’ operating expenditures (which are far higher than Medicare/Medicaid’s costs), profits and huge bonuses.

We need, no REQUIRE, a single payer, NOT-FOR-PROFIT healthcare system… just like most of the 36 better healthcare systems above us.

America #37!

 

Big Meds’ Extra Profit… America’s Extra Loss

Humana’s Net Rises 13% On Sizable Claims Drop

By DONNA KARDOS
April 28, 2008 7:10 a.m.

Humana Inc. posted a 13% rise in first-quarter net income amid a sizable claims drop as the company’s Medicare prescription-drug operations continued to struggle.

The health insurer also raised its full-year earnings outlook by a dime and issued a second-quarter outlook above analysts’ expectations

Humana reported net income of $80.2 million, or 47 cents a share, up from $71.2 million, or 42 cents a share, a year earlier.

Last month, Humana nearly halved its forecast to 44 cents to 46 cents a share on higher Medicare drug costs stemming from a cut in co-payments, which the company said was due to miscalculations in designing its Medicare prescription-drug plan. Humana said Monday earnings topped last month’s warning because of a lower-than-expected effective tax rate, which will also help full-year profits.

Revenue climbed 12% to $6.96 billion from $6.20 billion, driven by higher average Medicare Advantage membership. Analysts polled by Thomson Reuters expected earnings of 45 cents a share on $6.94 billion in revenue…

…Looking forward, Humana raised its 2008 earnings projection to $4.10 to $4.35 a share, compared with analysts’ latest mean estimate was $4.19 a share. The company also said it expects second-quarter earnings of $1.15 to $1.20 a share. Analysts projected $1.12.

B’Man: Better than expected profits and I am spending even more this year than last. So, who is paying the bill for the extra money I spend? Me, of course and they are doing even BETTER than expected.

THIS is a prime example of why we need a Single Payer, NOT-FOR-PROFIT healthcare system so these assholes will stop getting richer as we get sicker and poorer.