Insurance-Company Racketeers Have Overplayed Their Hand

"Insurance companies aren't playing nice any more," read the HuffPost lead paragraph of Monday's story detailing the latest extortion threats of this disgraceful, thieving lot.

Since when have these thieves ever "played nice?"

They're the same crowd who sent busloads of drooling, misguided and uninformed flunkies out to town halls this summer to subvert democracy with their idiotic yammerings. It's the same racketeering industry that has attacked a good man, President Obama, ceaselessly since he began trying to keep his campaign promises about health care.

If the health insurance companies had been around during the Civil War, they would have sent goons out to heckle the Gettysburg Address. Goons with guns, probably.

For-profit health insurance companies are a national disgrace, and a uniquely American one.

They are also the most visible sign of the kind of rogue capitalism that has seen its high-water mark and exists nowhere else in the world today.

The insurance companies have overplayed their hand this time, one suspects. I wouldn't want to play poker against the Chicago pols now in the White House. The rapacious and desperate insurance companies will be sorry they pulled this latest stunt of making threats, even as predictable as they might be.

The other night, MSNBC's Keith Olbermann, a guy I truly respect and admire, did an hour-long Special Comment/rant about health care. His central thesis is that the health care debate, above all, is about death, forestalling it or allowing it.

But it's about more than that. It's also about pain and suffering. Not every untreated injury results in death. Just suffering. And pain, sometimes of the intractable variety. E.g., broken bones, migraine headaches, wounds that won't heal.

These won't necessarily kill people. They'll just make humans suffer needlessly. Especially those with "pre-existing decisions."

So what if the Senate Finance Committee votes Tuesday NOT to slam the greedy, heartless bastards from the insurance companies and begin to put them out of business, where they surely are relegated?. Didn't four other Congressional committees approve a public option?

Why should Max "No Headroom" Baucus' committee, whose members represent less than seven percent of the U.S. population, have the final say? Why should insurance whores from small states easily bought off with insurance-company blood money have the final word on any of this?

And why should anyone believe -- or heed -- a single word of what the treacherous, greedy bastards from the organized-crime insurance rackets have to say?

The health-insurance companies will soon enough be relegated not to the ashheap of history, but to its sewage-treatment facility.

Follow Bill Mann on Twitter: www.twitter.com/newsmann

Comments

[parlimentMike]

They've already won. They've got us thinking that a public option is a win for the People. Progressive radio is trying to tell me that the Finance Committee bill is progress. That bill guarantees additional hundreds of billions of dollars will be diverted to those who provide no health care services whatsoever.

It's like we're trying to climb a mountain, and were calling the two-mile deep mine shaft we just dug progress.

If you don't participate in in the executive compensation plan of Pharma or an Insurer, or you are not a lobbyist or legislator, the starting point of this debate was a loss for you.

Everyone who has seriously looked into this situation knows that the only win for the People is single payor. The President, my congressman and senator have all told me through their spokesman that if they were starting from scratch, they would choose single payer. Well, if they say that, am I to believe that just extending Medicare for all at cost would be a more difficult legislative slog than the current patchwork of fails they're pushing on us?

Don't be confused EVERYTHING that isn't single payer resolves to dollars diverted from health to executive compensation and legislative coercion and payoffs.

[mexamerican]

nice. call 'em like you see 'em, bill mann!

[jsgaetano]

Time to teach the insurance companies a lesson- SINGLE PAYER HEALTH CARE FOR ALL.

[dfranz]

Unless you have stock in Health Insurance companies why would you care what happens to them?

[Travis2008]

You might also care if you're an average middle class working person employed by a health insurance company. Losing your job sucks no matter the industry.

[TRex86]

In 1992 the California Medical Association put an initiative on the ballot to deliver universal coverage to the citizens with no increased taxes. We were able to do it by carefully defining the benefit package and cannibalizing several health related state programs. Two weeks before election day we had a 2:1 margin in the polls. On election day we lost by nearly the same margin. The difference? The health insurance industry (HIAA) blitzed the state with $20 million of scary ads the last two weeks. To this day I can find no good reason why they did this. It was a private insurance based plan that would have assured all the stakeholders a fair return, AT NO INCREASED TAX COST. I suspect they destroyed the initiative just to keep anything from happening that might threaten the fragile equilibrium by which they maintained their domination of the market. I can't imagine how many people have died since then for lack of coverage.
May they burn in hell.

[Grunty1]

[AT NO INCREASED TAX COST]

Why did you highlight that part? It most certainly was NOT the motive of the inusrance companies.

[TJCole]

Bill you might think so, but our elected officials are in their pockets, and the bribe money is flowing like wine at a Roman Feast...

[Gidster]

The worst of the worst:
John McCain (R-AZ)- $2,885,602
Ben Nelson (D-NE)- $1,210,299
Max Baucus (D-MT)- $1,182,613
Arlen Specter (D-R-PA)- $1,037,205
Joe Lieberman (D-CT)- $1,035,302
Mitch McConnell (R-KY)- $928,007
Chuck Grassley (R-IA)- $888,724
Kent Conrad (D-ND)- $825,337
Jim Bunning (R-KY)- $793,999
Orrin Hatch (R-UT)- $664,057
Kit Bond (R-MO)- $644,571
Dick Shelby (R--AL)- $637,748
Blanche Lincoln (D-AR) $862,462

Notice how many of these name are the loudest opponents of any reform at all?

Not all of our elected officials are in the pockets of the insurance lobby........

[jsgaetano]

And notice how the Dems on that list are the people we'd most like to see kicked out of the party.

[TJCole]

The industry targets the bribe money where they get the biggest bang for the buck, in the committees and too committee heads...!

Wait till you see the so called Banking Reform, then it will be different leaders getting the biggest bribes..!

Pigs at the Trough, as Arianna calls it..!

[ariveria]

lets not forget the insurance companies already have death panels. the people on the death panels receive bonuses for denying coverages as the top executives at the health insurance companies.

there is today a health insurance bureaucrat between you and your doctor today.

health reform would eliminate death panels. health care reform would allow doctor and patient to make medical decisions.

"a lie repeated often enough becomes the truth"
glenn beck
information czar fox news
the view 5/20/09

[Gidster]

It is costing American lives to the tune of 123 a day.........

"If the lie is big enough, and repeated often enough it becomes fact"
Joseph Goebbels 1933

[cheeriogirl]

Never in my lifetime did I think I would ever agree with Beck on ANYTHING, but this time he is right.

Too bad HE and FOX are the very ones who keep repeating the lies.

Maybe this time we CAN stop this madness. It is time for NO MORE DEATH PANELS, NO MORE INSURANCE EXECUTIVES playing roulette with our health, hitting the jackpot when WE are DENIED the very care we have paid for.

[Kiku]

I hope so.

We are not only working against the insurance companies, but an entrenched philosophy in Congress that they can't make big changes, and a Republican Party that will let American fail before seeing Obama succeed.

This is a big lift.

Call Congress.

[jsgaetano]

If you want to see what the GOP has planned for America, just take a look at California.

We are now at the point California was after the conservatives had Enron plunder it, except they had their Wall Street, banking, and war profiteering minions plunder America.

[SimplyButtons]

I trust this mann. The insurance companies really have us. I am diabetic, totally under control, like I don't even have it. But I use this tube of cream on my feet each night, that is by prescription, because diabetics have to watch feet carefully. Eight years ago I paid $14. The we switched insurance companies to one where they mail to you... pretty nice but the price to me went up to $40. I called the pharmacy and they had just had a price increase too (I was going to go back to paying them personally). Two years go by and I run out (of cream) and decide just to have the doctor call one in to the local pharmacy. $380. I kid you not. Go ask your pharmacy the most you could pay for a type of foot cream. What they've done is jacked up the price to $390 so that they can dicker with each pharmacy. But what about the person with no insurance? That IS their price. I don't understand why the Pharmacy can't at least charge double what they really pay which is probably $20 but they can't. They probably won't tell you their cost but ask the highest price for the most expensive pills with or without insurance. Now that the Senate has refused to force people to sign up, insurance companies are threatening to charge the "real" price and take a little off if you have insurance.

[MeinNH]

Insurance companies (all of them) should be put out of business starting today. Single payer health care with full coverage, dental and vision care required for everyone. If you can pay fine, if you can't then you don't and let's use real number, not the fantasy numbers that they currently use. Everyone is signed up with SS numbers, they have all of our information, so it should take no more than 30 days to implement. Congress and the House can figure out how to pay for it later.

The longer we have to wait, the more the insurance industry will screw everyone over. Denial of coverage for a "too fat" baby, a liver transplant (called "experimental"), denial if you have been raped or suffered domestic abuse, and on and on and on.....why are we not screaming mad?

[ajwriter]

A "public option" will only guarantee ratcheted and more pernicious attacks. Anything that leaves the insurance industry at the table only guarantees they will continue eating our lunch in new and more cruel ways. Besides, the public option proposed wouldn't really be an option to most of us -- so how is that really an option? It only works if me, with my premium insurance, is allowed to choose the public option instead to repudiate the hell my insurer put me through to get the coverage I was promised in that contract I always paid on time for.

Single payer is the only answer that ensures lower costs, better healthcare delivery, and universal healthcare. Or going all non-profit in primary healthcare financing, even if we keep insurance companies. For-profit insurance doesn't exist in any other advanced nation in the world, because it doesn't work. Switzerland even tried it but abandoned it when all it did was raise costs.