Spintested

Health Law Costs, Benefits Can Add Up To A Win For Young And Old

Monday, July 16, 2012

'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.

The bill was written by the insurance industry. The regulations were created by the insurance industry and the regulations and legislation is being implemented and overseen by the insurance industry. Obama put the foxes in charge of this chicken coop (former WellPoint executives Liz Fowler and Steve Larsen) to write both the legislation and the regulations, and enforce the regulations.

Fowler's most notable actions to date has been issuing waivers to businesses that don't want to have to provide insurance to their employees. So much for Candidate Obama's pledge on restricting lobbyists from writing our laws.

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.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Health Law Costs, Benefits Can Add Up To A Win For Young And Old

We had high--priced junk insurance before. We got more of it.

ACA is not universal. It has no chance of expanding to cover everyone, and it leads to the end of all public healthcare programs (Medicaid, Medicare, SCHIP, CHAMPUS, veterans care, etc.). That's a fact. That's the point of it. To end all public programs, privatize them.

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 gets privatized, gets 'Bained'. The jobs go offshore, or the same government workers who did the job are hired by the Bain-like corporation, to do the same job, for less money and fewer benefits.

The taxpayer's still picking up the tab, but the money's now going to the private corporation which has to make a profit for its shareholders (as well as bloated CEO bonuses, some bling for his wife, etc.). Profit comes by denying medical care to subscribers.

What Obama did was entrench, institutionalize, the insurance industry as the 'for-profit'-gatekeepers to Americans getting medical care. For all time. And an expensive gatekeeper at that; much more expensive than the government (and less efficient, too).

Administrative costs, the amount of money taken out of every dollar the subscriber pays into the plan? Medicare takes about 5%. Private insurance companies take anywhere between 23% to 30% (and it's can be as high as 39%). Either the private insurance companies are grossly inefficient or they're extremely profitable for the people who run them. Net profit, after all, is what's left after all the bloated salaries of the upper management team is taken out.

What's wrong with that is that CEOs are making 400-500 times as much as the line workers and they're not doing it because they're incredibly savvy, efficient, inspiring leaders; they're doing it because they run in a rarified circle of like-minded people that mutually justify their obscene compensation packages.

Meet The New 1%: - Healthcare CEOs replace bankers as America's best paid:

Pity Wall Street's bankers. Once the highest-paid bosses in the land, they are now also-rans. The real money is in healthcare and drugs, according to the latest survey of executive pay. One example is Joel Gemunder, CEO Omnicare, who had a total pay package in 2010 worth $98 million.

'Line workers', by the way, are the actual providers of healthcare services, and in most cases their rates haven't been raised in close to 20 years.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Health Law Costs, Benefits Can Add Up To A Win For Young And Old

We Need to Know Who Funds These Thinktank Lobbyists:

Shocking, fascinating, entirely unsurprising: the leaked documents, if authentic, confirm what we suspected but could not prove. The Heartland Institute, which has helped lead the war against climate science in the United States, is funded among others by tobacco firms, fossil fuel companies and one of the billionaire Koch brothers

It appears to have followed the script written by a consultant to the Republican party, Frank Luntz, in 2002. "Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly. Therefore, you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate."

Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Health Law Costs, Benefits Can Add Up To A Win For Young And Old

Under The Radar, PR's Political Savvy:

When it comes to the inner workings of Washington, you often hear about lobbyists influencing the political process. But there's another time-tested profession that works just as hard trying to do much the same thing: Public relations. In D.C. it's often referred to as "public affairs" or "advocacy." But it's PR just the same.

First, what is the difference between lobbying and public relations? For starters, lobbyists have to disclose their activities. PR professionals do not. But they do work together.

David Fuscus, is president of Xenophon Strategies, a firm that does both. He uses a D-Day analogy.

"Everybody's seen the footage of the landing craft, the house on the hill in Normandy. Well, those guys in the landing craft are the lobbyists," Fuscus says. "They're getting ready to hit the beaches to go try and convince somebody to do something."

The lobbyists' target: Capitol Hill. But Fuscus says the PR folks deploy first.

"The communications, we're there about two weeks before. We're the Air Force. We're conditioning the legislative landscape for them to go and do it," Fuscus explains.

[...]

"The art of public affairs is telling your side of the story as many ways as you can to create that echo chamber around whatever target you're trying to reach," says Anne Womack-Kolton, the group's vice president of communications.

One the other side, there's the Environmental Working Group, where Alex Formuzis is vice president of media relations. He says one of the group's goals is to "provide media outlets — both new and traditional — with our research. They often report on it, and many have large audiences."

Layton says both sides in the BPA battle "have a pretty strong PR apparatus."

In Washington, one of the weapons advocacy and trade groups like to use to generate news is a new study. Layton says she has been inundated.

"I'll get an email or a phone call from either side saying, 'Hey, did you see this new Canadian study that says BPA is completely safe?'

Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Linkbar

Book Recommendations

Search This Blog

Spintested Twitter Feed

What I Read

Think Tanks

Blog Archive

Labels

Health Law Costs, Benefits Can Add Up To A Win For Young And Old

Monday, July 16, 2012

Health Law Costs, Benefits Can Add Up To A Win For Young And Old

Health Law Costs, Benefits Can Add Up To A Win For Young And Old

Health Law Costs, Benefits Can Add Up To A Win For Young And Old

Health Law Costs, Benefits Can Add Up To A Win For Young And Old

Tim Geithner's Libor Recommendations Came Straight From Banks, Documents Show

Tim Geithner's Libor Recommendations Came Straight From Banks, Documents Show

About This Blog