A repository for Marcospinelli's comments and essays published at other websites.

Did John Roberts Give Mitt Romney A Gift?

Friday, June 29, 2012


 the bill has profit and premium caps for insurance companies. How is this a negative?

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'Medical loss ratio' is what you're talking about.

And the insurance industry has already figured out the way around it.  

On Countdown with Keith Olbermann, whistleblower Wendell Potter talks with Lawrence O'Donnell about where the con game (medical loss ratio, the amount of money insurers must spend on health care) is in the legislation, and how it will enable insurance companies to continue to price gauge and keep obscene profits instead of delivering affordable and quality medical care to policy-holders.

Why put the insurance industry into the equation of Americans' medical treatment at all?  Insurance adds NOTHING to the medical model. The way that the insurance industry makes its profits is by taking a cut of money that can be spent on medical care.  And in reality the insurance industry profits like Wall Street and all other corporations that have crashed our economy have profited:  By denying claims and preventing treatment (Wall Street and corporations do it by offshoring manufacturing, outsourcing jobs, eliminating jobs in spite of record profits for short term windfalls to shareholders and bonuses for CEOs, etc.).  

The insurance industry is the 'Don Fanucci' (Godfather, Part II) of medical care; the insurance industry is "wetting its beak", letting you get medical care (maybe, if you can afford the deductibles, the co-pays, and if your illness is covered by your policy, but) only if you pay them a gratuity up front.

The controlling meme that has been operational for the past 40 years, the sales pitch for privatizing government services and resources, is that "private industry can do it cheaper".  While Republicans (Nixon) began it, Democrats joined in (Jimmy Carter).  But it's just not true that private industry does it cheaper.  Or even better.  

What the insurance industry has charged anywhere from 12-39 percent for, the US government (Medicare) does spectacularly well for 4 percent.
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Did John Roberts Give Mitt Romney A Gift?


Obama and the DLC-controlled Democratic Party got the healthcare legislation through that the insurance industry and PhRma wanted.  

From Amy Goodman's interview with whistleblower Wendell Potter, former CIGNA executive:




AMY GOODMAN: But don’t the insurance companies like this legislation?

WENDELL POTTER: They do. And that’s why this will not be repealed. They like a lot about it. This legislation, we call it "healthcare reform," but it doesn’t really reform the system. There are a lot of good things in there that does make some of the practices of the insurance industry illegal, things that should have been made illegal a long time ago, so that—

AMY GOODMAN: Like?

WENDELL POTTER:—for that matter, there are good things here. But it doesn’t reform the system. It is built around our health insurance system, as the President said. And they want to keep it in place, because it also guarantees that they will have a lot of new members and billions of dollars in new revenue in the years to come.

AMY GOODMAN: How does it ensure that?

WENDELL POTTER: One of the—the core component of this—and it’s kind of ironic, but the one thing that the Republicans and conservatives are saying they want to repeal is the provision that we all have to buy coverage from private insurance companies.

AMY GOODMAN: Like we do for auto insurance.

WENDELL POTTER: Exactly, right. And they’re citing or they’re saying that that’s unconstitutional. That’s also all for show, because it is just an effort to try to, in a sense, turn people away from the idea of reform. It sounds complicated, but it’s part of the insurance companies’ strategy.


Read the entire interview here.
About Health Care
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Did John Roberts Give Mitt Romney A Gift?


4. The ACA, although initially flawed, can be a stepping stone to a single-payer system, through an iterative, evolutionary process.

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Where do you get that idea, and how do you see that happening?  Step-by-step, explain yourself.
About Health Care
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Did John Roberts Give Mitt Romney A Gift?


By the way, the fact that the author repeatedly refers to the Affordable Care Act as "Obamacare" is a sign of where her political motivations lie.

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Obama Campaign Again Tries To Reclaim The Term ‘Obamacare’.

Dr. Marcia Angell is a proponent of single payer universal health care.  Here she is testifying before Congress as to the reason our health care system is in such a shambles:  

"It's set up to generate profits NOT to provide care.  To pay for care, we rely on hundreds of investor-owned insurance companies that profit by refusing coverage to the sickest patients and limiting services to the others.  And they cream roughly 20% off the top of the premium dollar for profits and overhead.  Our method of delivering care is no better than our method of paying for it.  We provide much of the care in investor-owned health facilities that profit by providing too many services for the well-insured and too few for those who cannot pay.  Most doctors are paid fee-for-sservice which gives them a similar incentive to focus on profitable services, particularly specialists, who receive very high fees for expensive tests and procedures.  In sum, health care is for maximizing income and not maximizing health..."

And ACA does nothing to change that.
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Did John Roberts Give Mitt Romney A Gift?


David Axelrod, and even Obama, call it "Obamacare".
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Supreme Court Health Care Decision Will Define The Future Of The American Health Care System

Thursday, June 28, 2012


So if I lamented about there being no Filipino restaurants around, instead of opening one stateside, your response would be "Move to the Phillipines!"  

In the US, part of our greatness, the reason people wanted to emigrate here, was our innovation and classness culture of inclusion of all - We built better mouse traps, and that meant state of the art industries that served the most of us efficiently and at reasonable prices.  SMART programs that included social safety nets, which benefit everyone.  

I think your xenophobia is showing.
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Why the Supreme Court Will Uphold the Constitutionality of Obamacare

Through their spouses and children.  There are some significant and troubling conflicts of interest with Clarence Thomas's wife, Ginni, and then there's Roberts's wife (Jane Sullivan Roberts) and Scalia's children.
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