In 1980 my brother died in one of those notorious one-car accidents that plague the nuclear whistleblower set. He’d arrived that afternoon with his wife and three children with U-Haul in tow to start a new life. He and my hubby drove into town to get formula and disposable diapers for his youngest, never made it home. By morning he was dead, hubby was in ICU.

It fell to me to deal with the car insurer and health insurer from his last job as health physics site coordinator at a nuke in Georgia, a job he’d quit two weeks before in order to move his family to New Mexico where we’d found refuge, had a job waiting for him building equipment consoles for radio and television stations. Because his insurance was through a rent-a-tech outfit out of Pittsburgh that often shuffled personnel around to different plants for outages and such, it covered him for a full 30 days between assignments and 30 days following termination. It came with a life insurance rider with a double indemnity clause if he died in an accident – $100,000 for his family.

It was the first time I’d lost someone very close, the first time I’d had to deal with reluctant insurers (we’d previously enjoyed purely socialist health care via the US Navy). I made a deal with the car insurer during a meeting in Santa Fe that if they’d go ahead and pay $1500 for his funeral expenses, they could fight it out with his health insurer for the hospital bills. This allowed his wife to pay for the cremation and an urn, which was only fair.

Hubby had no insurance, but the county of Taos had instituted a sales tax to cover the cost of indigent DFHs and mountain folk that ended up using the public hospital, so we didn’t have to worry about that – we never received a single bill. Which was also fair, considering they’d done absolutely nothing for him other than put him in a bed and hook him to a monitor. I was the one who pulled the glass out of his head, cleaned out his holes and butterflied his cuts, the punctured lung reinflated itself, and what can you do for smashed ribs? They didn’t even wash the blood off.

The life insurer for my brother balked, but by then we’d left New Mexico. We stayed only long enough for hubby to regain strength and get sis-in-law settled into a cabin, supplied with wood for the coming winter, and hooked up with food stamps and various support groups to help her transition to widowhood. In the end for my sister-in-law it took three lawyers in two states to get the life insurer to pay (how dead do you have to be?!), and they ate up $60,000 of the $100,000 that was supposed to go to his family.

So I got into the habit whenever life insurance salesmen called of asking if the policies they sold came with a legal rider to cover the cost of lawyers it would take to make them pay when we die. That was as effective at shutting them down as showing up to the door in a saffron robe when the JWs came calling!

My next experience with life insurance was as executor for my mother’s estate when she died in 2002. She’d worked for Blue Cross Blue Shield of Florida before retiring, had a $125,000 life policy through their offerings that she’d been paying on faithfully even when she couldn’t afford medicine. When the paperwork was done I was informed that BCBS’s provider had sold the policy when she retired, and the new insurer would only honor $60,000 of it.

Her policy was clear in black and white, she’d never been informed that her coverage had changed, and her payments had never been adjusted. I informed my sisters that it was a complete scam, that we could hire a lawyer and handily win a lawsuit. But it would take at least 5 years and the lawyer would eat more than what the scammers were offering. So of course we had to settle for the $60K, even knowing it was a complete rip-off. That policy represented something my mother had counted on to leave us, so I was glad she wasn’t around to deal with this. I reported them to the state Insurance Commissioner, who of course did nothing at all.

Health insurance is no better these days, nor has it been better for a long, long time. In 1992 our 21-year old son was injured in a car accident. We had a small business policy, $2500 deductible but a million overall. They pre-approved everything, including an air ambulance transfer from Louisiana (where the accident occurred) to Florida where we lived. Then, after his remaining injuries were identified and surgery was deemed necessary, the insurance company decided to rescind the policy and the doctors abandoned our son. Simply told us everything was fine and sent him home. He died two months later when the unrepaired rip in his internal carotid gave way and he bled to death. His doctors of record – five of them – refused to accept him into the hospital.

It took two lawyers two years to make the insurer pay the bills for what they’d approved, two more lawyers and seven years to get to trial in a malpractice suit against the doctors who abandoned him to his death for something that was entirely treatable. When it was all over the lawyers made out like bandits and we were out more than $50,000 for that small modicum of ‘justice’. The practices that were blatantly unethical and in several aspects illegal in 1992 have since become standard operating procedure. Which is where we are today.

Now whenever someone tries to sell me health insurance coverage I ask the same question – does this policy come with a legal rider to pay for the lawyers it’ll take to get you to pay a claim? None of them do, of course.

There’s a lot wrong with our medical system in this country, including some extremely serious problems with the delivery system itself I wrote about previously. Rampant malpractice, medical errors, in-hospital prescription errors, iatrogenic disease, pure negligence, etc. And a lot of that is a result of a class-based rationing system that nobody likes to admit exists, but does. Medicare patients get a different quality of care than the well-insured, the marginally insured get less care as well, the Medicaid recipients get genuinely lousy care, and the uninsured get pretty much nothing. ERs don’t even stitch cuts or set bones these days, they might butterfly your gash (or give you butterflies to do it with), dispense a pain pill, maybe offer a tetanus shot, and tell you to call a specialist who might fit you in in a month or so. The uninsured are routinely charged twice as much or more than anyone else. Nowdays even the insured are driven into bankruptcy by an accident or illness.

The only rational answer to this ever-worsening situation is universal, single-payer health care. Where everyone has the same necessary coverage and everyone receives what they need as best as can be provided. This is not what we’ll get, of course. What we’ll get are individual mandates for private scams and exactly zero oversight of the delivery system that all by itself is the third leading cause of death in the U.S., killing about 200,000 people a year who wouldn’t have died if they’d simply stayed away from doctors and hospitals.

I read today that by the time “Health Care Reform” (whatever that turns out to be) takes full effect in 2019, things will be much, much worse. If insurers are free to continue raising their policy rates at 4 and 5 times the rate of inflation – as has become the annual norm over the past decade and more – a fair insurance policy from a private insurer for a family of 4 will cost as much as $30,000 per year. If subsidies are available so that premiums, deductibles and co-pays together don’t account for more than 13% of Adjusted Gross Income, the government will be paying for all or some of this outrageous cost for every family whose AGI is less than $300,000 a year. How is that in any conceivable economic scheme “reform?” Where is the government supposed to get that much money? IRS fines of $3800 on the few who choose not to buy private $30,000 policies? That wouldn’t pass muster in any 6th grade math class!

Insurers are in it for the profits, not to make medical care available to people who need it. They are corporate entities, profit and profit alone is their job. Politicians are owned by the corporate lobbyists who are spending millions every day to make sure their scam remains lucrative. We’ll see no real reform. This is all just another huge heist and corporate bail-out, amounting to a $10,000-$30,000 tax increase plus a profits-bailout from the government for those who can’t afford the price. Which is the vast majority of us whose income has remained flat for a decade or decreased in the last couple of years.

I am surely not the only person who sees that this is never going to work. So I have grown very impatient with the strange Kabuki that pretends it might.

I might live another seven years and finally get some of that Medicare I’ve been paying into faithfully since I was 16 years old. Then again, given my strong dislike and distrust of the Amerikan medical system, I might not. That’s my karma, I’m okay with it and will take my chances. What I will NOT do is pay a huge chunk of my now nonexistent income so some insurance hack can get million-dollar bonuses for sentencing people to death. Nor will I have the government pay that same insurance hack his million-dollar bonuses FOR me. That might mean the IRS will charge me an extra $3800 on my taxes every year, but since I’m too marginal to pay that much in taxes, so what?

A friend of ours, Gordon Smith, has a good chance of getting elected this November. I’m thinking of trying to interest him in what Taos did way back in the late 1970s, of adding a penny sales tax on goods, a few cents on gasoline, a few bucks on tourists at local resorts and hotels, earmarked to the county hospital to pay for care to the uninsured. Lord knows we’ve got more than our share of DFHs and mountain folk here too (I’m one of ‘em). It worked in Taos, the referendum passed handily even in those dark economic days. I think it would pass here. And it’s a much better and fairer way of covering the actual cost of health care than anything D.C.’s been able to come up with.

[background on the NM adventure at the Institute for Southern Studies]

Last week we (or “current resident”) received a slick 4-color 6×10 card stock mailer that looks at first glance to have come from our NC-11 congressional rep, Heath Shuler. At the top the reverse-on-blue header reads:

“Congressman Shuler Is Fighting To Make Medicare Prescription Coverage Even Better”

and on the bottom reverse-on-red the italicized message reads:

“Call Congressman Health Shuler today at 202-224-3121. Tell him thanks for fighting to improve Medicare without making seniors pay more, and ask him to keep on fighting until we get the job done.”

The wording struck me a little odd. Why would Heath tell me to thank him for his notably atrocious Blue Dog position on health care reform? I mean, it’s not like he cares what Democrats in his district have to say about the issue. So I flipped the mailer over and read on the bottom of the address/postage space:

“Paid for by Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America.”

Whoa. Billy Tauzin’s notorious PhRMA lobby. The one that got a secret back-room deal with Obama before this issue ever got to committees in the House and Senate. And who are now sending deceptive mailers like this all over the country as part of a $150 million PR campaign to promote their continued obscene profits on the backs of senior citizens, while the mandate to force all citizens to purchase junk policies from the for-profit insurance industry amounts to a ~$12,000 per year (plus steep annual hikes at four or more times the rate of inflation) tax increase on the middle class. Earmarked directly to the Murder-by-Spreadsheet crime syndicate, this porker is uglier than Hogzilla.

FACT: According to an analysis of the proposed Part D changes by the Wall Street Journal, the Congressional Budget Office concluded that any decrease in average spending on prescriptions by seniors will more than be made up for by an increase in premiums seniors must pay for Part D. CBS News reported that CBO has confirmed seniors will be paying 20% more for Part D coverage by 2019 under this giveaway to Big Pharma.

FACT: The Baucus plan also abets another huge giveaway to insurers by allowing them to charge older people (age 50-64) up to five times as much as younger people for the insurance policies everyone will be required to purchase.

FACT: The per capita (per person) cost of ALL health care in the U.S. per year comes to right about $3,750. That is all care, for all people, insured and uninsured, Medicare, VA, Medicaid, SCHIP and charity. Why would anyone want to pay $12,000 a year for what actually costs $3,750? A government-run single-payer system could be paid for by graduated taxation based on actual costs and those taxes would be far cheaper even to the richest of the rich than the cost of a single for-profit insurance policy.

Links:

NYT: Drug Makers to Back Baucus Plan With Ad Dollars

NYT: How Much Should Older Americans Pay for Insurance?

WSJ: Part-D Offsets

CBS: 20% increase in Part-D premiums

According to figures from the Center for Responsive Politics Shuler has received the following contributions from shady players:

$195,262 from the health sector employees and PACs.
$13,750 from health insurance companies.
$74,800 from Big Pharma.
$77,062 from health professionals.
$27,900 from hospitals.
$10,500 from the nursing home industry.

$399,274 in total. Now, the figures from CRP are what the Blue Dogs (individually) have received since 1989 from the PACs and pools of various health related industries, but Shuler’s only been in office since 2007. So that’s quite the hefty haul over less than three years!

Below is the letter I have written in response to this blatant insult from the Drug Pusher’s Union Propaganda Squad…

__________

Dear Congressman Shuler;

The four registered voters in our NC-11 household were appalled by a slick mailer we received last week from the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America urging us to “thank” you for working for them instead of us in the matter of health care reform. This letter is to lodge formal complaint and explain once again why we do NOT want either the insurers or the drug companies writing this necessary legislation.

Our formal complaint is to the information provided in this mailer that you work for Big Pharma and not for us, the constituents you were elected – by us – to represent. This lobby group actually expects us to congratulate you for serving out-of-state corporate donors instead of us. We most certainly do not congratulate you for succumbing to rampant D.C. corruption in record time.

The mailer talks about how Big Pharma’s contribution to the reform effort will help close the Medicare Part D “donut hole” they themselves wrote into the original bill to ensure obscene profits and force American seniors on fixed incomes to pay more for necessary drugs than anyone else in the world. As well as prevent Medicare by law from negotiating lower drug prices, as all other first world nations (with universal, single-payer health care) do and have done so successfully for so long.

In fact, according to an analysis of the proposed Part D changes under HR 3200 by the Wall Street Journal Health Blog, the Congressional Budget Office concluded that any decrease in average spending on prescriptions by drug-dependent seniors will more than be made up for by an increase in premiums seniors must pay for Part D. CBS News reports that CBO determined seniors will be paying 20% more for coverage by 2019. 20% is very significant to a great many seniors in your district, Mr. Shuler.

Two of the voters in this household – myself and my husband – will be 68 years old in 2019. Thanks to the recent destruction of the nation’s economy by greedy bankers and insurers (whom we and our children and grandchildren were forced to bail out to the tune of trillions in completely unaccountable dollars), our only income will be Social Security, and our only access to health care will be Medicare. So you are going to deliberately rob us further on orders from your corporate masters? That is completely unacceptable.

As proud long-time residents of WNC, registered Democratic voters and active participants in Democratic politics, we will be lobbying hard and very publicly beginning immediately in favor of a primary challenge to you next year from a candidate more committed to both the people of this district and the Democratic Party. You brought this on yourself, as we were all delighted when you were willing to run against Charles Taylor. We would have supported you for a very long career in politics if you’d just been less willing to sell us out in favor of corporations who do NOT vote in this district and cannot keep you in power.

Though they probably can make you rich, so you may wish to go ahead and apply for that post-Congress Big Pharma lobbying job now.

In Sincerely Sad Disappointment,

[the four of us registered voters, address in NC-11]
__________

Wanted: Dedicated public servant and Democrat with an understanding of policy issues that impact the residents of Western North Carolina, to vie for Heath Shuler’s seat in Congress in the 2010 primary.

We’ve been told Obama’s “got this” because he can shoot hoops in the WH basement with skill, and grab flies out of the air like a Kung Fu master. We’ve been told Obama’s playing “multidimensional chess” with his opponents by continuing every single one of the illegal and anti-democratic policies of his Neocon predecessor. And now, with the health insurance reform debate gone all Town Hall during recess, we are told we don’t really need health insurance reform, single payer health care, or even a public option to facilitate the expected mandate we’ll be handed that forces us to pay more money than we’ve got to the murder-by-spreadsheed for-profit industry.

We still have “state secrets” privilege on who’s lobbying in the Oval Office. We still have DADT in the military. We still have two illegal wars going, a new third front opened in Columbia, off-the-books deficits accumulated by the fact that there’s twice as many paid mercenaries in those war zones than U.S. soldiers, we’re still rendering and torturing “detainees” who haven’t been charged with any crimes and haven’t been afforded the status of POWs, and we’re still bailing out Wall Street gamblers to the tune of multiple trillions while not even beginning to address reinstating necessary regulations.

A plethora of Democratic/Progressive activist groups have sprung up to pressure Congress and the White House on these issues as well as health insurance reform, letter-writing campaigns, calls and emails to representatives and senators, mass demonstrations… You name it, it’s being done. And what we get from the WH is insults and dismissals as those of us anywhere to the left of center are repeatedly told to STFU.

Meanwhile, I am receiving between 6 and a dozen pleas for money every single day from various Democratic entities. DCCC, DLC, etc., etc., each one of them extolling me to give more to ensure that “my” interests are represented and protected by people who have amply demonstrated they don’t represent my interests or care about protecting me or my family from the corporatist policies of the Neocons who Won’t Go Away. So I have decided to take a clue from my grandson, who turned 18 last year and registered to vote for the first time. For Obama, of course.

We were originally a little piqued that he chose to register Independent instead of Democratic, but he was adamant and is perfectly happy with his choice. In our state he could still vote in the primary – one merely has to request either the Dem or Rep ballot to vote in one of them, it doesn’t matter what your own registration is. And I notice that he never gets any political mail asking for money he hasn’t got or telling him outrageous lies about what ‘his’ party’s doiing in the state or in D.C.

If the end product of this health insurance charade turns out just as it looks very strongly to be turning out, I am changing my voter registration from Democrat to Independent. Figure that the party hacks who don’t care about what I think or want can do what they do without my support or my money. They can just cross me off their list, and my email will be much more manageable. In writing this, there’s a small chance that others might consider the idea to be pretty good, and perhaps a few of them will change their registration too. If the idea catches on, a lot of people might decide to change their registration to reflect something real that nobody in D.C. seems to have noticed.

The Republicans are now marginalized to a regional sub-party status, claiming less than 20% of all voters and dominant in only 5 states. Libertarians are stronger than that. They’ve a few leftover power brokers in D.C. stonewalling all things necessary to save the country, but Democrats dominate. Dems now calll themselves the “Center-Right” party, telling us that the 79% of Americans who are center-left to progressive are insignificant. We don’t deserve representation. If they were to actually LOSE that 79% – or any considerable fraction of it – they just might have to start doing the jobs they were elected (by us) to do. And if not, we can go ahead and field candidates of our own and have a real chance of winning.

We are all the way to a single-party system in this country, all possible challengers relegated to 20% of the electorate or less. Except for the left-leaners in the dominant party, who have been told to STFU. Well, okay. We can split that coconut rather dramatically, and end up with a larger portion than they’ve got left.

Or not. I won’t be holding my breath for other progressives to catch a clue. I’m changing my registration and getting my name off their fundraising list. After more than a week of battling swine flu, it’ll make me feel much better, I’m sure. Wish me luck!

Iatrogenic, adjective
a medical disorder caused by the diagnosis, manner or treatment of a physician.

Iatros is the Greek word for physician. -genic means induced by. Iatrogenic disease is a disease caused by a physician. Given the sheer complexity and technological wonders of modern Western [allopathic] medicine have led to some stretching of the strict meaning of the term, which is now applied to ANY adverse effect associated with ANY medical practitioner or treatment. Thus it can be used to describe the cancers caused (years down the line) by radiation and radioactive isotopes used to treat initial problems, prescription errors, hospital-contracted infections, problems caused when a surgeon leaves an instrument or two in the patient, a chiropractor who breaks the patient’s neck, etc., etc.

When I was busy educating myself as much as possible when my daughter determined to have her baby at home, I discovered that the nations that have the best statistical outcomes – fewest maternal and infant deaths or injuries – actually encourage home births because hospitals are dangerous places to both mothers and infants. They’re dangerous places for anyone these days, it seems. According to statistics compiled by OurCivilization.com, there are 8.9 million “unnecessary” hospitalizations every year in this country, which lead directly to 1.78 million “Iatrogenic Events.” Of 7.5 million “unnecessary” procedures ordered annually by physicians, another 1.3 million patients suffer direct harm. That adds up to 16.4 million people channeled into a harmful situation by their medical providers every year, and 3.8 million cases of direct harm to those people that they otherwise would not have suffered.

The same source estimates annual deaths caused by various leading iatrogenic factors, reaching a total of 783,936 deaths at a cost of $282 billion. Every year, and that’s not the highest estimate available. A simple extrapolation on the statistics gives us a projected 10-year death rate of 7,841,360 people, more people than have been killed in all the wars the United States ever fought over its entire history.

Medical insurance reform – which is the most we’ll ever get from Congress, and that’s likely to be a simple mandate to buy junk insurance – does not even begin to address what’s wrong with the health care system in this country. All it will do is put more people in harm’s way, given that medical care is now the third leading cause of death in the U.S. The American iatrogenic Association [AiA] is working to make the truth known to the general public, and to promote policies that will begin to address the serious issues. I encourage everyone concerned about the health care situation in this country – both access and quality of care – to check out their website and the collection of articles, essays, studies and book excerpts they offer.

The Truth is that at least 12,000 people die every year of unnecessary surgeries. Another 7,000 die to medication errors in hospitals. 20,000 die due to other errors in hospitals. Hospital-acquired infections, many resistant to known antibiotics, kill another 80,000. 106,000 die of those nifty “bad effects” of drugs their doctor prescribed, often for no better reason than that some hypnotized medically-obsessed junkie saw it advertised on TV and just HAD to have it. Only heart disease and cancer beat the medical system in this country on number of victims every year. You can bet that many of those the medical system kills were there because they were diagnosed with one of those issues, but their doctor or hospital killed them before their disease could.

This unacceptable situation SHOULD inform us that more access to the system for more people is not going to cure what ails us. All that is just more money for the players in that nasty futures market in human suffering. I read about a woman the other day who had her baby taken away from her because she resisted a doctor’s insistence that she submit to C-section (dangerous major surgery), at a hospital with a C-section rate approaching 50% of all births. What the hell kind of quality control is going on there? C-section is medically indicated – to save the life of mother or child in an extreme situation – for fewer than 6% of all births. I for one do not consider a doctor’s tee-off date to be an extreme situation threatening the life of mother or child. I DO consider unnecessary surgery to be a direct threat to life and limb, and so should everyone else in the world!

So when your least-favorite WingNut starts ranting about “ObamaCare” and euthanasia for poor old Granny, respond with some REAL statistics about what’s way more likely to kill off Granny and everyone else in the family before their time – that which passes for “health care” in this, the supposedly richest country the world has ever known. If all our government can do is offer more citizens the ‘right’ to access the killing floor, we’re better off without it.

So. Just wanted to continue with a theme, because I think it’s extremely useful as a means of keeping our heads about us while dealing with clinically insane bizonker-birthers who can’t tell their asses from their outhouse in this so-called “Health Care Debate.” Nobody anywhere is really doing anything about what’s actually wrong with health care in this country, and they will continue to do nothing about it until we’re all dead of it (or maybe just old age). NONE of them are addressing the problems.

House minority whip Eric Cantor explains how he supports Rush Limbaugh as the Republican Party’s leading economist, with some really great “ideas.” Like cutting taxes for corporations and wealthy Americans, while slashing government spending on Medicare and Medicaid. Now, why didn’t Republicans think of this when they had complete control of the government over the last eight years? Oops… they did.

Meanwhile, Reuters reports in One in 10 Americans receiving food stamps that indeed, a record 32.2 million Americans are now receiving food assistance to the tune of just over $112 a month. This reflects the latest unemployment figures, 8.1% in February, the highest in a quarter century. Luckily, under President Obama’s stimulus plan, food stamp recipients will be getting a temporary 13% increase which still won’t actually feed a person for a whole month given rapid inflation of food prices, but will stretch the budget a little farther.

DKos diarist Dartagnan offers the Republican response to the situation of so many Americans finding themselves in need of assistance from the government to cover something so basic as food. It won’t surprise you any more than Limbaugh’s not-new “ideas” about how to keep the rich from having to pay their fair share toward the public good.

Seems Craig Blair, a state legislator in one of America’s poorest states – West Virginia – has introduced a bill that will require recipients of food stamps or any other form of government assistance to submit to random drug testing. He includes unemployment benefits in his plan, reflecting once again the tired old Republican worldview that insists that people down on their luck and in need of assistance are just lazy, drug-addicted bums that don’t deserve a handout (even if they’ve been paying for unemployment insurance for many years). That this testing would add an entire layer of bureaucracy and hoop-jumping doesn’t seem to bother him, nor does the additional millions of dollars it will cost the state to test those long lines of people at the unemployment office. Jerkwad.

But West Virginia wingnuts aren’t the only ones on the New Eugenics bandwagon. Lawmakers in 10 states are now considering the very same type of legislation. They tried this in both Michigan and Arizona, but those laws were either struck down in court or found to be so expensive they were unworkable. In Tennessee, state representative Susan Lynn introduced similar drug testing legislation, justifying it with the usual Repuglican sense of social justice…

“Taxpayers are concerned that they might be funding the monster of drug addiction, and they don’t want that,” Lynn said. “This is really no different than what people are used to.”

Wow. I didn’t know you could buy pot with food stamps! Did you? Can Rush Limbaugh use them to buy Oxycontin?

Amazing…

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.

America doesn’t need health insurance. It doesn’t need more junk health insurance. It doesn’t need to force businesses to be non-competitive in the world markets because they have to provide health care (via insurance) to those lucky enough to have jobs that offer it…

What America needs is health care.

Tomorrow – July 30 – is the 40th anniversary of Medicare. As an action item, LtEs and letters of complaint/support can be sent to the NY Times in response to Blumenthal’s opinion piece, to AHIP the insurance industry lobby, and/or to The President’s Council on Bioethics.

American citizens are dying right now for lack of health care, at the rate of at least 50 per day. Is killing men, women and children in Iraq MORE important than treating people right here at home?

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.

The truth is, a health care policy that covers everything but cancer doesn’t exactly do me a lot of good. And John McCain and I have something in common – neither one of us would be covered by his health care policy.

Of course, McCain sees no reason to change how health coverage is [not]done in this country because he says government health care is terrible. He should know, since he has enjoyed taxpayer-sponsored government health care all his life, never had to buy a policy and never got turned down for getting or being sick. Here’s the video…

Links:

Transcript: “This Week”
NYT: Before Medicare, Sticker Shock and Rejection
Politico

Enjoy!

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