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You Have To Buy Their Defective Product

August 27, 2009

You Have To Buy Their Defective Product

Corpus Callosum. August 27, 2009 by Joseph j7uy5

The health care reform process is getting extremely ugly.

Healthcare Insurers Get Upper Hand
Obama's overhaul fight is being won by the industry, experts say. The end result may be a financial 'bonanza.'
LA Times August 24, 2009
By Tom Hamburger and Kim Geiger

This Isn't Reform, It's Robbery
Truthdig August 23, 2009
By Chris Hedges

Small world. Truthdig was started by, among others, Robert Scheer. Robert Scheer used to work for the LA Times. He alleges that he was fired for writing about controversial topics (criticizing President Bush). So he went off and started his own gig. Then he publishes a controversial story, one day before the LA Times publishes a similar story on the same topic. Still trying to figure this out. Maybe it is OK for the liberal media to be critical of a Democratic president, but not a Republican one.

From the LA Times:

Reporting from Washington - Lashed by liberals and threatened with more government regulation, the insurance industry nevertheless rallied its lobbying and grass-roots resources so successfully in the early stages of the healthcare overhaul deliberations that it is poised to reap a financial windfall.

The half-dozen leading overhaul proposals circulating in Congress would require all citizens to have health insurance, which would guarantee insurers tens of millions of new customers -- many of whom would get government subsidies to help pay the companies' premiums.

"It's a bonanza," said Robert Laszewski, a health insurance executive for 20 years who now tracks reform legislation as president of the consulting firm Health Policy and Strategy Associates Inc. [emphasis added]

From Truthdig:

The current health care debate in Congress has nothing to do with death panels or public options or socialized medicine. The real debate, the only one that counts, is how much money our blood-sucking insurance, pharmaceutical and for-profit health services are going to be able to siphon off from new health care legislation.

By the way, Hedges cites, via Harper's Index, the statistic: Chances that an American bankrupted by medical bills has health insurance: 7 in 10. This may have come from the recent article in The American Journal of Medicine: Medical Bankruptcy in the United States, 2007: Results of a National Study. The original article is behind a pay wall, but again, Google (or Yahoo) the title, and you find that a full copy has been posted somewhere.

Using a conservative definition, 62.1% of all bankruptcies in 2007 were medical; 92% of these medical debtors had medical debts over $5000, or 10% of pretax family income. The rest met criteria for medical bankruptcy because they had lost significant income due to illness or mortgaged a home to pay medical bills. Most medical debtors were well educated, owned homes, and had middle-class occupations. Three quarters had health insurance. Using identical definitions in 2001 and 2007, the share of bankruptcies attributable to medical problems rose by 49.6%. In logistic regression analysis controlling for demographic factors, the odds that a bankruptcy had a medical cause was 2.38-fold higher in 2007 than in 2001. [emphasis added]

One of the ugly things about the debate over health care finance reform: The Fallacy of Health Care Reform as Economic Stimulus. This ~~dreck~~ highly questionable article, posted on the Heritage Foundation site, alleges that health care reform won't be a boost to the economy. The ugly part of it is that they may be correct. Not because reform could not boost the economy, but because none of the proposals under serious consideration could do so. Instead, they'd act as an additional drain on the economy. As currently proposed, the changes (I'll stop calling this a reform) would extract money from the pockets of poor and middle-class persons, and put it in the coffers of the super-rich. And from there, it would be invested in paper. This would be very bad.

It does not have to be that way. Don't screw around with a bill that runs thousands of pages. Write a one-page bill that gives everyone Medicare, and be done with it. Anything else, and you end up with a camel sausage designed by a committee.

Still trying to understand this. Obama could do better, I think. But to understand, read this, on Democracy Now!

It looked like it was business as usual for President Barack Obama on the first day of his Martha's Vineyard vacation, as he spent five hours golfing with Robert Wolf, president of UBS Investment Bank and chairman and CEO of UBS Group Americas. Wolf, an early financial backer of Obama's presidential campaign, raised $250,000 for him back in 2006, and in February was appointed by the president to the White House's Economic Recovery Advisory Board. Economic recovery for whom?

At first glance, it seems completely unrelated. Obama playing golf with a high-stakes banker...what does this have to do with health care?

The relevance comes from what it tells us about Obama's psychology. This is speculative, so take it that way. Obama is like Isaac Asimov. Asimov was a science fiction writer, who famously was characterized as being able to write faster than most people can read. He also was criticized for being unable to portray a character that truly was evil. The thought was, that he was such a gentle intellectual, that he simply could not even conceive of an evil person, much less portray one.

Perhaps Obama is the same way. Despite all his experience, he simply cannot understand that some people are just plain evil, or just plain greedy. He seems to think that if you are nice enough to everyone, they eventually will do the right thing.

Playing gold with a powerful banker, he may think, is fine. Perhaps some of Obama's good qualities will be imparted to the banker. He seems to not realize how hazardous it is to be around these people. Likewise, he does not realize how thoroughly corrupt some industries have become.

The articles I cited early in this post, seem to indicate that the insurance companies are not serious about reform. They look at the changes in the system as an opportunity to increase their profits. This, obviously, makes the health care delivery system less efficient. It cannot be a good thing.

We in the USA were shocked in 2008, when schools collapsed in China, during an earthquake. Other buildings, near the schools, did not collapse. It was alleged that shoddy construction was the cause. Activists who tried to investigate were arrested and put on trial for subversion. We may never know the truth.

What this illustrates, and the way it relates to the health care situation, is this: The construction companies allegedly used substandard materials.

"These buildings just weren't made for that powerful of a quake. Some don't even meet the basic specifications," said Dai Jun, a structural engineer and concrete specialist in Chengdu who was surveying damage in the area.

That increased their profits. Now, I have nothing against profits in general. But when lives are lost, and profits are excessive, there is something wrong with the system.

Bill McCamley pointed out, corruption can kill people.

I realize that there is a gray area here. It is easy to call someone else's profit excessive. But when a top executive is making $100,000 per hour, using insurance premiums that people paid with the expectation that a fair portion would go toward their medical expenses, that is excessive. The Truthdig and LA Times articles indicate that the situation may get worse, not better. That is why I can't honestly call the proposed changes reforms.

From the Truthdig article:

The Democrats are collaborating with lobbyists for the insurance industry, the pharmaceutical industry and for-profit health care providers to craft the current health care reform legislation. "Corporate and industry players are inside the tent this time," says David Merritt, project director at Newt Gingrich's Center for Health Transformation, "so there is a vacuum on the outside." And these lobbyists have already killed a viable public option and made sure nothing in the bills will impede their growing profits and capacity for abuse.

"It will basically be a government law that says you have to buy their defective product," says Dr. David Himmelstein, a professor at Harvard Medical School and a founder of Physicians for a National Health Plan. [link added]

Is it odd that someone from Newt Gingrich's Center for Health Transformation would be opposed to the same thing that Dennis Kucinich opposes? Not really. Gingrich's group is all about free market solutions. The current proposals have nothing to do with free market principles, rhetoric notwithstanding. Government protection of private profits is something that neither the free-market types, nor the progressive types, can abide.