Think Humanely

The senate has now finished rubbing their greasy, McTeague-like fingers all over their health care bill, having made it progressively worse with every single Congressional meeting and change. Let’s remember: the House version was already considered a weak, watered-down version of true reform that didn’t go nearly far enough in helping individual Americans. In fact, it seemed to be more supportive of the very insurance companies that the bill was supposedly designed to protect Americans from in the first place. This version now looks like the Civil Rights Act compared to what the Senate has managed to shit out.

The senate version has no public option, which in and of itself was a down-syndrome version of a universal or single-payer system. Nick Skala, who worked for Physicians for a National Health Program, had this to say about the public option:

The public option preserves all the systemic deficiencies that we see in the current system…It maintains a finance system that is based on private insurance and private insurers and their drive to fight claims, issue denials, screen out the sick and make a big profit generate tremendous administrative waste — 400 billion dollars a year.

Now you can expand coverage by just raising taxes and paying insurers to cover people but that’s not a sustainable system…But it won’t cover every body and it will fall apart quickly due to rising cost as we’ve seen in Massachusetts, Vermont, Oregon, Tennessee and Minnesota — state after state after state and it hasn’t worked.

Now the definition of insanity is to repeat what has gone on in the past and expect a different result. Yet that’s what we’re doing with the public option. And as a representative of physicians in that capacity, and certainly the relationship I have with nurses and patients, I feel it’s my duty to be honest about the best policy research, the best literature, and the best experience that we have and that all indicates that the public option is going to fail.

Also see this chart comparing a single-payer system with that of the public option. It is important to note that a single-payer system would actually save an estimated $400 billion a year.

So our elected representatives first refused to adopt a single-payer system that has been proven effective by various western industrialized nations, all of whom are generally ranked higher in terms of medical care than the United States. At least the public option, despite all of its serious faults, at least provided Americans with a choice beyond the corrupt, malignant private insurers. People could finally get care and treatment at a relatively affordable cost without being subject to the whims of corporations that value profit over its customers. But that, too, is now gone.

Despite the fact that the Senate stripped their bill of such an option for the American people, they have continued to insist on a mandate. This literally baffles me. I’m a misanthrope. A cynic. I expect incompetence and corruption from our elected officials. I expect dishonesty and theft. Despite this, despite my low, in-the-gutter covered with toxic runoff expectations, I am still shocked by the unbelievable, blatantly corrupt and unethical nature of this mandate. Let’s be clear: the government is going to force every American to buy private insurance or face significant fines and possible confiscation of funds by the IRS. Some people will qualify for some government assistance, but ultimately, a gun is being put to your head and you’re being told to open your wallet and hand over your hard-earned income to the same assholes who provide such an expensive, shitty service that you either can’t already afford it or don’t want to. Democrat Anthony Weiner, echoing propaganda common among his colleagues and uncritical supporters of this legislation, tries to mask the mandate as a responsible obligation that every American should fulfill and has compared it to car insurance.

Weiner is either deluding himself to make the bill more palatable, suffering from a rather serious intellectual deficiency, or outright lying to the public. This comparison to car insurance is a classic false analogy, finding one or two similarities between the two and therefore concluding that they are entirely alike or comparable. Weiner assumes that the driving of a car is comparable to being able to receive medical treatment. No one argues that driving a car is a universal or moral right, let alone an imperative. Being able to do so is obviously helpful, but you’re not going to die or watch someone you love die as a result of not having one or having one that is of inferior quality.

Also, what is the reason for driver’s insurance? It is so that if you carelessly or recklessly cause damage to someone else’s property (or damage is done to yours), no one has to go bankrupt in order to pay for repairs. More importantly is the fact that paying for car insurance doesn’t lead to bankruptcy at all. There is a vast price difference between car and health insurance. The average cost of car insurance is $795 in 2007, an actual decrease of 2. 6%. The cost of health insurance in 2009, however, is $4,824 for an individual and $13,375 for a family, an increase of 5% from the previous year. In this same report from USAToday, John Fritz notes, “Since 1999, health insurance premiums for families rose 131%, the report found, far more than the general rate of inflation, which increased 28% over the same period. Overall, health care in the United States is expected to cost $2.6 trillion this year, or 17% of the nation’s economy, according to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office.”

If you can’t afford car insurance, you still have options. You can possibly drive someone else’s car or rely on public transportation. Comparable options do not exist for health care.

In most of the western industrialized world, health care is considered a right, not a luxury. Such a belief isn’t even a recent development. Dr. King said, “Of all forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhumane.” Hippocrates argued that, “A wise man should consider that health is the greatest of human blessings.” And Buddha: “Without health life is not life; it is only a state of languor and suffering – an image of death.” No one bats an eye at not being given or provided a car. But it is grossly inhumane to deny someone medical attention, or at least the means to attain it. People die from one, inconvenienced by the other. Medical insurance isn’t about protecting other people from a mistake on your part, but about protecting yourself against the inevitable deterioration of our bodies, from accidents outside our control, from environmental poisons and toxins, from anguish and suffering itself.

The service provided by private insurance companies is so astronomically priced and provides so very little that of all the medical-related bankruptcies in this country, 60% are actually already insured. The average cost of health insurance doesn’t reflect the hundreds of thousands that one is still likely to incur if ever seriously injured or ill. This isn’t protection. It’s more akin to a mafia shakedown. Pay us money or we’ll beat the shit out of you. Paying this mandate won’t be the sign of a responsible American, but a desperate one who has been mugged in the alley, an American that is likely to fall further and further into economic disarray while receiving a product that has consistently been ranked as one of the worst in the Western world. The World Health Organization currently has us rated #37 in the world , far behind all of those “evil socialist” countries in Europe and elsewhere.

The very idea of forcing Americans to give more of their money – money that they do not have – to private insurance companies is repulsive. These companies already make billions of dollars. According to FactCheck.org, the following companies posted these earnings:

UnitedHealth Group: $859 million in the second quarter of 2009
Humana Inc.: $282 million quarterly profit
Health Net: $40 million profit in the spring alone
Wellpoint: $693 million in this quarter
CIGNA: $435 million for the quarter

All of this while the average family income has fallen. David Leonhardt writes , “the typical American household made less money last year than the typical household made a full decade ago. . . In the four decades that the Census Bureau has been tracking household income, there has never before been a full decade in which median income failed to rise. (The previous record was seven years, ending in 1985.) Other Census data suggest that it also never happened between the late 1940s and the late 1960s. So it doesn’t seem to have happened since at least the 1930s.” As if further stuffing the coffers of gluttonous, indifferent insurers with the diminishing savings of Americans were not offensive enough, consider not just the inferiority of the service, but the character of the companies providing it. Their profits are in direct proportion to the suffering of Americans. Former senior executive at CIGNA Wendell Potter testified against his former company before the very Senate that craft this bill. As Ezra Klein reports

The industry, Potter says, is driven by “two key figures: earnings per share and the medical-loss ratio, or medical-benefit ratio, as the industry now terms it. That is the ratio between what the company actually pays out in claims and what it has left over to cover sales, marketing, underwriting and other administrative expenses and, of course, profits.”

Think about that term for a moment: The industry literally has a term for how much money it “loses” paying for health care.

Knowing this, these companies find ways to refuse the authorization of treatments. Americans will be paying for something that they may never receive, not because of some product shortage or lack of need but simply because the insurance companies know they can increase their profit off of saying no to the sick and dying. And whereas a car insurance company’s refusal to pay a claim may only result in having to live with a dent in the side of your car, a health insurer’s declination can and does result in death.

This is who the Senate, knowing all of this full well, wants to force you to enrich. This is who they want to force you to rely on in order to live and be healthy. Is it any wonder then that the stock for these companies have increased upon completion of a bill that is supposedly reforming and regulating the industry? Shahien Nasiripour notes

Investors are seeing the Senate’s version of health care reform as a massive public subsidy for insurance companies — and as a result, are sending the sector’s stock prices shooting up, up, up. Stripped of a government-run insurance plan, the bill would give tens of millions of Americans no option but to start paying hefty premiums to private companies.

The rise in stock prices has been particularly striking in the period since Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) said on October 27 that he would filibuster a Senate health care reform bill if it included a public option – a threat that caused Senate leaders to cave without much of a fight.

Here’s a quick breakdown of major health insurance company stock performance from Oct. 27 to Friday’s market close:

• Coventry Health Care, Inc. is up 31.6 percent;
• CIGNA Corp. is up 29.1 percent;
• Aetna Inc. is up 27.1 percent;
• WellPoint, Inc. is up 26.6 percent;
• UnitedHealth Group Inc. is up 20.5 percent;
• And Humana Inc. is up 13.6 percent.

Americans aren’t the ones that the United States Senate are protecting and trying to help. Private insurance companies, however, are. After all, healthcare companies have spent $ 635 million dollars on lobbying Congress in just the past two years alone while the average American is still spending his or her money on frivolous things, such as food and shelter.