Killing People for Fun and Profit

Stephanie Woolhandler, M.D. of Harvard Medical School testified before the President’s Council on Bioethics this past week about her experiences with [non]health care in Amerika. The council was created in 2001 to ‘advise’ the president on bioethical issues arising from advances in biomedical science and technology. 

Single-payer, “Medicare for All” type reform is drastically needed as the US falls farther and farther away from the so-called ‘Modern World’ in terms of the general health, life expectancy, infant and maternal mortality rates, and the sheer number of hard-working citizens who will die without any medical care at all because they simply have no access and cannot afford it.

“I’ve seen people die because of co-payments and deductibles.”

There are an estimated 47 million Americans with no insurance. And as more and more of them are losing their jobs and their homes as the economy descends into depression, that number will rise dramatically. An estimated 18,000 Americans Die every year because they have no health insurance or money to pay thousands of dollars’ worth of deductibles and co-pays for the junk insurance they do have. Fully one half of personal bankruptcies in this country are the result of getting sick or injured. 76% of those filers HAD insurance when they got sick or injured, but the deductibles and co-pays bankrupted them anyway.

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Health Insurers On The Warpath

As the economy continues to slip deeper into recession and the Presidential race becomes ever more one-sided in favor of real change, America’s Health Insurance Plans [AHIP] are hitting the road to defend their practice of “Murder By Spreadsheet.” Or, as one energetic activist calls the offensive, the Deceive America Tour.

AHIP is the trade and political lobbying association of DC insiders and overpaid executives for the health insurance industry. The industry that has wrecked health care delivery by bankrupting public hospitals, been targeted for racketeering suits under RICO, routinely refuses to pay claims while throwing families into bankruptcy, and continues to cripple American business competition in foreign trade with nations whose businesses do not hold primary responsibility for citizens’ health care costs.

2007 estimates of the number of uninsured Americans reached more than 75 million adults - 42% of all adults age 19 to 64 were uninsured or ‘underinsured’ - and the US has fallen to 47th in the world on life expectancy at birth. This week AHIP launched its Campaign for an American Solution tour in Columbus, Ohio, purporting to have A Plan to cure America’s health care woes without having to pay for any sick people’s actual health care or forego their profit margins, golden parachutes, luxury limousines and multi-million dollar salaries.

AHIP calls it a “listening tour” outreach, which means they’re quite likely to encounter some loud protests wherever they go in this effort to protect their bottom lines from reality. The speculative futures market in human suffering is just far too lucrative to lose, and the insurance hacks illegally practicing medicine these days have no intention of backing down.

Please check out the tour schedule for when these folks will be coming to your area, then you may wish to contact one of the single-payer activist groups listed below to lend your presence to the protests. It’s well past time for America to join the modern world.

National Organizations:

Physicians for National Health Program
Guaranteed Health Care [California Nurses Assn/Nat. Nurses Organizing Committee]
Health Care Now
Everybody In & Nobody Out

Everybody In & Nobody Out supports state organizations working at the grassroots level for universal care, and offers links to those state organizations. You can also find lists of state groups in your state at the other national organization sites.

A Swashbuckling Musical Interlude

A toe-tapping Austin Lounge Lizards take on the health insurance industry, only this time instead of Guido and the Goons, we get Cap’n Kaiser and his notorious crew of murder by spreadsheet bottom-feeders!

Enjoy!

People of New York vs. Vampires

If you’re middle class (like most of us), you know about how health insurance premiums keep going up, covering less, and robbing you of more than your COL increments every year. In my post Health Insurance Racket as Organized Crime I outlined the details of how two of New York City’s major public health care providers filed RICO suits against UHC and its underlings.

Because it is a racket, it’s bankrupting citizens everywhere, and now it’s all the way to closing important hospitals DOWN because they can’t get insurance to pay for care to patients who *are* insured. A case study in how Corporate Greed and Unbridled Lust for Profit can end up destroying the entire fabric of the nation on which these corporate raiders depend for their very life.

Today New York state Attorney General Andrew Cuomo filed a formal Intent To Sue action against the database company Ingenix - owned by the same parent company as UHC - for its fraudulent manipulation of the database most insurance companies use to set reimbursement rates for out-of-network medical expenses.

The United insurers and many other health insurance companies relied on the Ingenix database to determine their “reasonable and customary” rates.  The Ingenix database used the insurers’ billing information to calculate a “reasonable and customary” rate for individual claims by assessing how much a similar type of medical service would typically cost, generally taking into account the type of service, physician, and geographical location.  However, the investigation showed that the “reasonable and customary” rates produced by Ingenix were remarkably lower than the actual cost of typical medical expenses.

Links:

Cuomo Announces Industry-Wide Investigation Into Health Care Insurers’ Fraudulent Reimbursement Scheme

The Health Care Plans: Worthless

The Health Insurance Racket as Organized Crime

The Truth About Insurance

NY Atty. Gen. announces investigation into health insurer fraud

The Health Care Plans: Worthless

Now that I’m over my disappointment in the sudden withdrawal of John Edwards from the nomination race, I’m back to officially “undecided.” I’ve reservations about both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, beginning on the policy side with health care.

Since both Clinton and Obama developed their plans while taking large campaign contributions from insurers, it’s not surprising that their plans are “insurer-friendly.” Both involve mandates requiring citizens to purchase health insurance from an insurance company. Both avoid highlighting problems with the way insurance works as the reason our system is in such outrageous disarray.

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The Health Insurance Racket as Organized Crime

“…insurers are just like shoplifters, they devise a new scheme a day.”
Michael A. Sedrish, M.D.
Director of Utilization Management
MediSys Health Network

In comments to other posts on the subject of the health care crisis in America, I have been asked to list some of the practices of health insurers that require rectification, and asked if doing away with health insurance altogether might be the best option for the country.

It is difficult to use examples from other people’s health insurance horror stories or even my own - though such horror stories are common enough - as objective justification for my belief that insurers need to be stripped of their excessive profits retroactively for at least a decade and a half (by means of punitive fines), and that a complete realignment of health care in America to single-payer, universal care is the best possible option for our society in the 21st century.

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John Edwards and “Dead Liver Girl”

Wow. Just… wow. Those Moonies at the New York Post have once again proven themselves to be as evil as their megalomaniacal leader (you know, that rich Korean nut case who swears he’s Jesus Christ), taking on John Edwards and the parents of Nataline Sarkisyan in a radical hit piece entitled Edwards’ Evil Insurance Scam - I kid you not. The subtitle is even more demeaning - “Twisting Tragedy of Dead Liver Girl.”

Dead Liver Girl? Oh, for pity’s sake! Nataline’s parents contacted Edwards’ campaign headquarters after their daughter died. She died because Cigna Insurance Company denied her doctors’ pleas for a liver transplant to save her life, saying that liver transplants are “experimental.” They reversed their decision when the California Nurses Union and Armenian activists demonstrated at their headquarters, but by then Nataline was already dead. The Sarkisyans appeared at a health care forum in New Hampshire with Edwards, and have come out in support of his candidacy as well as his plan to provide health care to all Americans.

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The Truth About Insurance…

…and Health Non-Care in Amerika

My readers know I’ve been following the latest developments in the “Health Care Crisis” in America, and the various Democratic candidates’ positions on that issue. I haven’t covered any Republican candidates’ positions because they basically don’t have any - just business as usual, which isn’t working to deal with the situation that most regular Americans are very acutely aware of.

I read a diary on DKos today that speaks to my underlying issue pretty well. Health Insurance Evils starts off with a tragic situation with the diarist’s 3-year old son who had a stroke in 1986 and died 4 years later. It’s definitely worth a read if you too have ever had to deal with an insurance claim that cost the insurer more than your annual payments for the policy added up to. That’s the kicker with the entire for-profit system of insurance, be it health, life or car insurance in this country. Once they start losing money on you, you’re outta here.

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CA Court Nails Insurance Scam

There is some slight good news on the health care front , which is encouraging after the bad news last week of Nataline Sarkisyan’s unnecessary Murder by Spreadsheet. A California appeals court has ruled that insurers cannot arbitrarily cancel health insurance policies when the covered person gets hurt or ill.

Yes, that does happen, and has been happening often enough over the past decade that the judicial system is now very much involved. The 4th District Court of Appeal in Santa Ana further ruled that insurers cannot cancel policies unless they can demonstrate that the policyholder willfully misrepresented his health on the application, and that the insurer had investigated that application before issuing the policy.

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Grief in the Wake of Victory

The Health Insurance Scam Breaks

Yahoo News issued a release on Thursday evening (December 20) from the California Nurses Association touting the victory of their joint demonstration with the National Nurses Organizing Committee and the Armenian community at the CIGNA insurance offices in Glendale, California, CIGNA Capitulates to Patient Revolt…

In a stunning turn around, insurance giant CIGNA has capitulated to community demands, and protests that the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee helped to generate, and agreed to a critically needed liver transplant for Nataline Sarkisyan, a 17-year-old girl in the intensive care unit at UCLA Medical Center, says CNA.

Meanwhile, activists from all over the country were spurred into inundating CIGNA’s phone lines throughout the day after learning of the situation and protest on websites like Daily Kos, My Space and others.

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