America For Purchase

The for-profit health care industry CEOs are intent on saving their salaries and huge corporate profits over the health of Americans.  While many Americans, 47 million, do not have health insurance, and for the millions who are fortunate enough to have health insurance through their employer, those numbers are dropping.   The National Coalition on Health Care reports employment-based health insurance has dropped from 70 percent in 1987 to 62 percent in 2007. This is the lowest level of employment-based insurance coverage in more than a decade. (See salary chart below)As millions of Americans are finding themselves without health care, or are filing bankruptcy to cover catastrophic health emergencies, American health care providers are reaping record profits for their shareholders and record salaries for their CEOs from hardworking, taxpaying Americans.  Of course if you are a member of Congress, you do not have to worry about health care since Americans not only have to pay for health coverage for each member, we also have to pay for health care coverage for all Congressional members and their families, for life. 

No wonder during the current health care debate, many Congressional leaders removed the single payer option from consideration, even though it is a less expensive option and could save Americans and the U.S. Government millions of dollars.  Congress wants to continue to receive the huge campaign funds donated by the health industry and they seek to continue the pillaging of American family incomes while filling their personal war chests are full for the next election.  Does anyone actually believe Congress cares about Americans?

Health insurance premiums continue to skyrocket and while many Americans are ‘priced out’ of health insurance options and health care, it is unbelievable to discover what the health industry CEOs are actually earning, at our expense.  While the American people find themselves priced out of health insurance and healthcare, the CEOs of America’s largest for-profit health insurers are making record salaries.

How serious are the Republicans in squashing single payer? The Washington Post’s health care reform blog reported Tuesday that Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina has hired an outside PR firm to put together a video campaign assaulting Obama’s public plan. And this month alone, the group Conservatives for Patients’ Rights is spending more than a million dollars for attack ads. They’ve hired a public relations firm called CRC, Creative Response Concepts. You remember them, the same high-minded folks who brought you the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, the gang who savaged John Kerry’s service record in Vietnam.

The ads feature the chairman of Conservatives for Patients’ Rights, Rick Scott who was a former deputy inspector general from the Department of Health and Human Services.  Scott is not a doctor, he is a convicted felon who took two hospitals in Texas and built them into the largest health care chain in the world, Columbia/HCA. In 1997, he was fired by the board of directors after Columbia/HCA was caught in a scheme that ripped off the Federal and State governments for hundreds of millions of dollars in bogus Medicare and Medicaid payments, the largest such fraud in history. The company had to cough up $1.7 billion dollars to get out of the mess.  

FierceHealthcare reports the following top 10 CEO salaries for 2008. 

• Ron Williams – Aetna – Total Compensation: $24,300,112.
• H. Edward Hanway – CIGNA – Total Compensation: $12,236,740.
• Angela Braly – WellPoint – Total Compensation: $9,844,212.
• Dale Wolf – Coventry Health Care – Total Compensation: $9,047,469.
• Michael Neidorff – Centene – Total Compensation: $8,774,483.
• James Carlson – AMERIGROUP – Total Compensation: $5,292,546.
• Michael McCallister – Humana – Total Compensation: $4,764,309.
• Jay Gellert – Health Net – Total Compensation: $4,425,355.
• Richard Barasch – Universal American – Total Compensation: $3,503,702.
• Stephen Hemsley – UnitedHealth Group – Total Compensation: $3,241,042.

When American patients trust their health to a for-profit insurance company, they’re doing nothing less than gambling with their lives in a game where the odds are stacked in favor of the insurance company.

These are salaries reminiscent of the AIGs, the Goldman Sachs, the Merrill Lynch’s, and other Wall Street CEOs who also pillaged from the American taxpayer and turned around and gave themselves and their executives multi-million dollars bonuses.   

Deborah Burger, RN, co-president of National Nurses Organizing Committee and the California Nurses Association explains it this way:

“We all know the incredible financial and lobbying resources that health insurance and pharmaceutical companies bring to the table in Washington, but Congress does itself a disservice when it refuses to talk about the success of single-payer healthcare.  Nurses and doctors support single-payer because it works.”

“A single-payer system says NNOC/CNA, is the most effective reform to assure universal coverage, choice of doctor, and real cost controls that will end the financial and healthcare insecurity faced by American families and American businesses. Under a single-payer system, patients choose from among competing doctors and hospitals, which are paid from a universal, nonprofit health coverage fund, with no co-pays or deductibles, real cost controls, and comprehensive benefits for less than we and our employers pay now.”

The Single payer, health care option initially proposed by President Obama on his campaign trail is merely health coverage, like Medicare, but it is for anyone who wants it. Single payer eliminates insurance companies as pricey middlemen. The government pays care providers directly. It’s a system that polls consistently have shown the American people favoring by as much as two-to-one.  Of course, it is this option that these CEOs and Congress are fighting against because it means less profit for health care companies who favor their bottom line over quality, more affordable health care coverage.

The existing health care option proposed by Congress, the GOP and Sen. John McCain falls short, (and they know it) because:

• Many Americans, especially American families, cannot afford the insurance premiums offered by employers. As cost of housing, fuel, education, food, insurance continues to rise; salaries across the board have been stagnant or declined.
• Health insurance continues to increase, and rise without question and Americans who lose a job, or self-employed, work part-time, retire or divorce are cut off by employer health care coverage, if they even had it.
• No American can actually afford COBRA insurance, the premiums are cost prohibitive and employers know it.
• The Republican, GOP plan to force Americans to buy health coverage and giving them a small tax break means these same families who cannot afford to buy health insurance now, certainly cannot afford to buy the more expensive insurance under their plan.

In Bill Moyers recent article posted May 24, 2009 in AlterNet “How Can We Expect an Industry The Profits from Disease and Sickness to Police Itself? he aptly writes the following:

“So the banks were too big to fail and now, apparently, health care is too big to fix, at least the way a majority of people indicate they would like it to be fixed, with a single payer option. President Obama favors a public health plan competing with the medical cartel that he hopes will create a real market that would bring down costs. But single payer has vanished from his radar.

Nor is single payer getting much coverage in the mainstream media. Barely a mention was given to the hundreds of doctors, nurses and other health care professionals who came to Washington last week to protest the absence of official debate over single payer.

Is it the proverbial tree falling in the forest, making a noise that journalists can’t or won’t hear? Could the indifference of the press be because both the President of the United States and Congress have been avoiding single payer like, well, like the plague? As we see so often, government officials set the agenda by what they do and don’t talk about.

Instead, President Obama is looking for consensus, seeking peace among all the parties involved, except for single payer advocates. At that big White House powwow in Washington last week, the President asked representatives of the health care business to reason together with him. “What’s brought us all together today is a recognition that we can’t continue down the same dangerous road we’ve been traveling for so many years,” he said, ” that costs are out of control; and that reform is not a luxury that can be postponed, but a necessity that cannot wait.”

Way, way back in the 1970′s Americans were riled up over the rising costs of health care. As a presidential candidate, Jimmy Carter started talking about the government clamping down. When he got to the White House, drug makers, insurance companies, hospitals and doctors – the very people who only a decade earlier had done everything they could to strangle Medicare in the cradle – seemed uncharacteristically humble and cooperative. “You don’t have to make us cut costs,” they promised. “We’ll do it voluntarily.”

So Uncle Sam backed down, and you guessed it. Pretty soon medical costs were soaring higher than ever.

By the early ’90s, the public was once again hurting in the pocketbook. Feeling our pain, Bill and Hillary Clinton tried again, coming up with a plan only slightly more complicated than the schematics for an F-18 fighter jet.

This time the health industry acted more like Tony Soprano than Mother Teresa. It bludgeoned the Clinton reforms with one of the most expensive and deceitful public relations and advertising campaigns ever conceived – paid for, of course, from the industry’s swollen profits.

The health care industry has spent $134 million on lobbying this year to keep its profits high and public health in the shadows.

As the drug and insurance companies, hospitals and doctors dumped the mangled carcass of reform into the Potomac, securely encased in concrete, once again they said don’t worry; they would cut costs voluntarily.

If you believed that, we’ve got a toll-free bridge to the Mayo Clinic we’d like to sell you.”

With medical costs rising six percent per year, that’s who’s offering himself as a spokesman for the health care industry. Speaking up for single payer is Geri Jenkins, a president of the California Nurses Association and National Nurses Organizing Committee – a registered nurse with literal hands-on experience.

“We’re there around the clock,” she told our colleague Jessica Wang. “So we feel a real sense of obligation to advocate for the best interests of our patients and the public. Now, you can talk about policy but when you’re staring at a human face it’s a whole different story.”

The USA adheres to free market capitalism on a level not unlike Stalin adhered to communism; Capitalism is our national ideology (at least of our leaders in business and government) and they do not want to admit that the free market system has failed. Regardless of the obvious benefits of a single payer system, creating such a system would be a blatant admission that the free market has failed. Conservatives and Republicans will go to ridiculous lengths to protect their discredited ideology when it comes to health care, as was evidenced of their rejection of SCHIP in the last years of the George W Bush regime. As always, new Democratic presidents have a way of “getting with the program” once elected. Obama is no exception.

Since the current method in the US is to view health as a product and the provision of health care as an industry, there are many sound commercial reasons for the way in which such care is made available, and as long as the concept of ‘health as product’ remains the standard, it is likely that progress on certain chronic diseases will not be too pronounced because the long term investment in treating chronic diseases might be jeopardized by a too comprehensive cure, or other treatment.

There are many Americans who are suffering needlessly because they cannot afford basic health care. The U.S. is the only developed country that does not have universal health care. Democracy doesn’t mean you have the right not to get health care when you need it or go broke trying to pay for major conditions such as cancer care. Basic health care should be the right of all citizens. It should be a national priority.

If the problem is the owning class’ ruling elite “not getting it” and their systems are not only in place but actively pursuing the subterfuge, seems to me the owning class is long overdue for a public beating.

These are the people, Republicans, Wall Street and Conservatives who trade in shame and fear. If it is the only ‘thing’ they understand or listen to; I believe it is time to shove it into their lives where they cannot ignore it any longer.  These greedy politicians and insurance companies are truly a bunch of thieves. They all have health care and they do not care about anyone in America who lacks it. The single payer option is the only answer, but I fear too many Americans are so brainwashed by the free market propaganda they get from all sides (that’s right, it’s even taught in ‘Economics 101′ classes) that they do not even support what is good for them and their families.

For more information on single payer health care option please see the California Nurses Association‘s website.

Tags bill moyers CNFO CNO Conservatives Democrats health care reform health care salaries John McCain lobbyists max baucus Republicans rick scott single payer

Filed under: American Injustice