Think Humanely

Rep. Dennis Kucinich announced that he would vote ‘Yea’ for the excrement-filled piece of legislation laughingly referred to as health care reform. Kucinich, who has advocated for universal health care, has the following press release on his website:

Congressman Kucinich, along with Congressman John Conyers (D-MI), introduced HR 676, Medicare for All, a bill to provide high-quality health care to every American. This bill would provide all Americans the health care they need, from any doctor they choose, at a universal, high standard of quality. Americans would not be burdened with co-payments, premiums or deductibles. Rather, they would be guaranteed access to medically necessary health care, including inpatient and outpatient care, dental care, vision care, pharmaceuticals, and other treatments that a patient’s doctor would deem necessary.

Medicare for All would cost the same amount of money that is now spent on health care costs. Funds would be provided by savings from a vast reduction of paperwork, existing government spending on healthcare, savings from rational bulk procurement of medications, a tax on the top 5 percent of income earners, a small tax on stock and bond transfers, and a phased-in payroll tax that is less than what employers currently pay on average for less complete employee health coverage.

Compare the above bill, which is excellent and actually accomplishes what those who support the current Senate bill claim to support, with the utterly corrupt and impotent legislation that is likely to now be passed both in the House and the Senate. The current version of bill most likely to pass has no single-payer system. It has no public option. It has nothing to control costs. It has nothing to keep greedy insurance companies from charging customers mafia-like rates for coverage. Worst of all, especially given that insurance companies have no check on their price-gouging, is that the government is forcing every single American to buy from one of these private insurance companies or else face the bureaucratic wrath of the IRS. Here is what I wrote about the mandate vis-à-vis no public option:

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.”

Kucinich, in a press release in November of 2009, had the following comments about the then-version of the “reform” bill:

We have been led to believe that we must make our health care choices only within the current structure of a predatory, for-profit insurance system which makes money not providing health care. We cannot fault the insurance companies for being what they are. But we can fault legislation in which the government incentivizes the perpetuation, indeed the strengthening, of the for-profit health insurance industry, the very source of the problem. When health insurance companies deny care or raise premiums, co-pays and deductibles they are simply trying to make a profit. That is our system.

Clearly, the insurance companies are the problem, not the solution. They are driving up the cost of health care. Because their massive bureaucracy avoids paying bills so effectively, they force hospitals and doctors to hire their own bureaucracy to fight the insurance companies to avoid getting stuck with an unfair share of the bills. The result is that since 1970, the number of physicians has increased by less than 200% while the number of administrators has increased by 3000%. It is no wonder that 31 cents of every health care dollar goes to administrative costs, not toward providing care. Even those with insurance are at risk. The single biggest cause of bankruptcies in the U.S. is health insurance policies that do not cover you when you get sick.

But instead of working toward the elimination of for-profit insurance, H.R. 3962 would put the government in the role of accelerating the privatization of health care. In H.R. 3962, the government is requiring at least 21 million Americans to buy private health insurance from the very industry that causes costs to be so high, which will result in at least $70 billion in new annual revenue, much of which is coming from taxpayers. This inevitably will lead to even more costs, more subsidies, and higher profits for insurance companies — a bailout under a blue cross.

And the bill which Kucinich rightfully lashes above is one that actually had a public option. This is what makes his turn to support the current legislation so very disappointing. It would be one thing if we knew that the Senate would largely fix all the gross deficiencies in the bill via reconciliation, which would include adding in a public option. But we don’t know this. And we have no reason to even find such a scenario probable. Instead, we’ll likely see only minor tweaks – if any – made, and thus Americans will once again be forced to take it on all fours.

So why did Kucinich do this? He has obviously spent most of the current session thinking that this and similar bills are pretty horrible. He has obviously thought that there are significantly better alternatives, alternatives that will actually benefit the American people whereas this one largely will not. I obviously cannot know what goes on in this man’s mind; I do know, however, that he has been the subject of some rather vociferous attacks by members of the left.

Markos Moulitsas said that Kucinich had blood on his hands and would face a primary challenge if he continued to oppose this government subsidiary of private insurance companies at the expense of poor Americans. This hack then proceeds, petulantly, to claim that Kucinich has never accomplished anything in his career, that he’s a ‘Utopian,’ and that he doesn’t represent his constituents. The last is an especially odd claim given that Kucinich has been re-elected, term after term, since 1996. Moulitsas: you, sir, are a fucking asshole.

Alex Koppleman recently wrote the absurdly titled piece, “The Liberal Case Against Dennis Kucinich,” in which he parrots many of Moulitsas’ so-called points without providing any ioda of skepticism or critical opposition to the ranting of what appears to be a man who has let the popularity of his circle-jerk of a website go to his head. Two individuals, whatever intelligence they might exert on other public policy issues, here display the mental acumen of people who have been deprived of oxygen for one minute too long.

Again, I don’t know what role, if any, such public admonition played in Kucinich’s reversal. But I almost have to hope that it did; the alternative is that he somehow convinced himself that this bill is actually worth becoming law. If this is true, then there is one less voice fighting for the ‘Utopia’ that Americans deserve.

In a related note, Sen. Harry Reid’s wife and daughter were in a serious car accident recently. His wife broke her nose, neck and back. She was rushed to a hospital and operated on, during the course of which she had a titanium plate inserted into her neck. She is expected to make a full recovery. How fortunate for her that her husband not only makes $174,000 for less than a year’s worth of work, but also receives federally-provided insurance.