America For Purchase

AARP (American Association of Retired Persons) has a vested financial interest in fighting and lobbying against the Single Payer health care option giving American Boomers and Seniors a choice in health care coverage.   Americans should realize AARP represents the corporate powers that be and is closely aligned with the private health insurance industry, especially United Health Care which they successfully market and sell to Seniors, many who do not realize the financial gain received by AARP.AARP receives more annual revenue from licensing and sponsorships from organizations such as United Health Care and taking their ‘cut’ before they send premiums to the Hartford Financial Services Group.  AARP adamantly opposed HR 676 which gives the ‘option’ of single payer health care as AARP does not want to see Americans have a health care choice because it would cut into their profits.  The truth is AARP only supports health care reform that protects its massive insurance revenues and has no chance of actually solving the health care crisis.

Having belonged to AARP for over decade, I have seen it morph from a useful lobbying organization for older folks into essentially a quasi-insurance company. A company that pimps their various insurance products to trusting and gullible senior citizens, when in reality AARP has become a personal money fountain for its leadership and it has not truly represented its members in many years.  Remember the Medicare Drug Coverage issue from a few years back?  Negotiating prescription drug prices would have saved senior citizens hundreds of millions of dollars but AARP sided with the drug companies to protect drug industry profits along with the personal interest of AARP.  They claimed the existing prescription drug coverage through Medicare was the ‘best they could do’. Bull hockey!

AARP tries to convince the public they are the ‘good guys’.  They are NOT!  [See the article “AARP’ Stealth Fees Often Sting Seniors with Costlier Insurance” reported by Bloomberg.com found here.

AARP claimed HR 676 “essentially eliminates Medicare, Medicaid, and the SCHIP programs that have served the American public well for many years. …”   This is UNTRUE!

Starting over with a new, single-payer program will not eliminate the problems Medicare, Medicaid, and SCHIP currently face, such as the spiraling costs of procedures and prescription medications, as well as technological advances that are often not comprehensively tested to be proven safe or effective before marketing, HR 676 will actually reduce costs by cutting out the ‘middle man’.  What American wants and insurance company making health care decisions?

As with many right-wing and Republican groups, they say single payer is ’socialized medicine’, as if that is a bad thing!  They also use other demagogic ’scare tactics’ such as “socialized medicine” “rationing” and “welfare dependence”. This is just another classic American fraudulent claim. Single payer is NOT socialized medicine.  Single-payer is publicly financed but privately delivered, it is merely an OPTION. Unlike for-profit insurers, no one would tell you to stay “in network” or pay for care yourself, for instance. It cuts out the huge for-profit insurance companies who turn Americans down for health care based on pre-existing conditions, who make decisions about Americans health care refusing various treatments because the insurance companies want to save money.  In essence the Health Insurance Companies become the ‘doctor’s deciding what treatment is or is not covered, over the actual physician’s treatment to save lives.

The truth is America is full of socialized programs which work very well for this country.  Medicare is a socialize program, so are the police departments, education, fire departments and the U.S. Military.  Have you ever heard anyone claim America needs to remove these valuable, lifesaving government programs because they are ’socialized’!  How absurd!

As with any other Republican lead organization, AARP touts single payer as socialized medicine, how silly!  Former AARP CEO Bill Novelli, whose salary in 2009 was $1,797,751, plus benefit plans and expenses bringing it up over $2 million, and the current CEO A. Barry Rand and AARP President Jennie Chin Hansen who also receive huge financial rewards for protecting AARP’s profits, along with other top executives and AARP board members.  AARP also has a new headquarters in Washington D.C. A bond was taken out on it for over $200,000,000 (it consist of two ten story buildings connected by an enclosed landscaped atrium). One member who tried to get a tour of the building to see how his AARP dues were being spent was turned away while in the main lobby of one of the buildings but not before seeing a part of its opulence: the AARP member said “the brass doors and the marble stretched as far as he could see.”

Let’s review the facts:

The United States spends at least 40% more per capita on health care than any other industrialized country with universal health care

Private for Profit Corporations are the least efficient deliverer of health care. They spend between 20 and 30% of premiums on administration and profits. The public sector is the most efficient. Medicare spends 3% on administration.

Federal studies by the Congressional Budget Office and the General Accounting office show that single payer universal health care would save 150 to 200 Billion dollars per year despite covering all the uninsured and increasing health care benefits.

Health care costs are simply unsustainable both to government and to business. The external costs just to us as a society are staggering.

However this health care issue shakes out. The private for profit health care industry needs to reduce their overhead. Up to this point they have had no incentive to do so. Perhaps single payer (or a variation of) is the impetus that has them re accessing their business model.

The truth of this is evidenced by the fact that numerous studies have shown that the administrative costs for Medicare – a government-run program – run at about 2%, as compared to 30% or more for private insurance. (Some have estimated that the total overhead and administrative costs for the U.S. health-care system is as high as 50%!)

A GAO study, already in the 1990’s, found that the U.S. could save enough simply on administrative costs with a single-payer national health program to cover all uninsured Americans.

A 2003 study in the New England Journal of Medicine, comparing administrative costs of health care in the U.S. and Canada, found that in 1999, and administrative costs per capita were $1,059 in the US, compared to $307 in Canada. By one measure, administration was 31% of health care expenditures in the US, compared to 16.7% for Canada’s mixed public-private insurance system. Canada’s national health insurance program had overhead of 1.3%; its private insurers had overhead of 13.2%.

The NEJM study found that it would save $209 billion annually, just to cut U.S. overhead costs to the level of Canada. That figure is about $400 billion today, according to testimony by Harvard’s Dr. David Himmelstein, to a House subcommittee on 4/23/09. Himmelstein argued that only a publicly-financed, single-payer system can rein in costs while guaranteeing universal, comprehensive coverage.

Himmelstein attacked the half-measures being proposed by some Democrats, including that of a “public plan option,” and he showed that costs have skyrocketed under the Massachusetts plan, which has a public plan co-existing with private insurance.

David Himmelstein is an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and co-founder of Physicians for a National Health Program.

The majority of doctors support single payer, the majority of the American people support single payer, and the majority of health economists support single payer.

Then why isn’t single payer the law of the land? Because protecting the profits of the health insurance industry and the pharmaceutical industry is paramount to AARP.
AARP is the enemy; they spend a lot of money on public relations trying to look like they are the good guys. They are part of a PR coalition – Divided We Fail. And yet they lobby and lobby and lobby and lobby in every state. In Oregon two years ago they threatened that if Medicare were put on the table in health care reform, local legislators would lose their jobs.

AARP should be ashamed of themselves for the various scams they put over on senior citizens; but when money is involved, AARP will put profits over the health care of Americans seniors every time!

Contact AARP and tell them no AARP for you until they support single-payer health care.
Please don’t join AARP or cancel your membership to AARP. Make sure you tell them why.http://www.aarp.org/about_aarp/contact/a2003-01-22-membershipfaq.html

Call 1-888-OUR-AARP (1-888-687-2277) Monday – Friday, 7am – 11 pm ET

To send an e-mail to AARP go to:

Tags AARP disabled elderly fund-raising government Health Organizations infirm max baucus Medical Specialization Medicare Pharmaceuticals Private Health Care strong-arm-tactics us-news

Filed under: American Injustice