This Isn’t Reform, It’s Robbery

Health care profit percentages have increased radically while health care insurance payments have decreased because the insurance industry has been allowed to play doctor with our health needs.

Percentage change since 2002 in average premiums paid to large US health-insurance companies: +87%

Percentage change in the profits of the top ten insurance companies: +428%

Chances that an American bankrupted by medical bills has health insurance: 7 in 10

 —Harper’s Index, September 2009

Medical care is not a consumable good. We can choose to buy a used car or a new car, shop at a boutique or a thrift store, but there is no choice between illness and health. And any debate about health care must acknowledge that the for-profit health care industry is the problem and must be destroyed. This is an industry that hires doctors and analysts to deny care to patients in order to increase profits. It is an industry that causes half of all bankruptcies. And the 20,000 Americans who died last year because they did not receive adequate care condemn these corporations as complicit in murder.

The current health care debate in Congress has nothing to do with death panels or public options or socialized medicine. The real debate, the only one that counts, is how much money our blood-sucking insurance, pharmaceutical and for-profit health services are going to be able to siphon off from new health care legislation. The proposed plans rattling around Congress all ensure that the profits for these corporations will increase and the misery for ordinary Americans will be compounded. The corporate state, enabled by both Democrats and Republicans, is yet again cannibalizing the Treasury. It is yet again pushing Americans, especially the poor and the working class, into levels of despair and rage that will continue to fuel the violent, proto-fascist movements leaping up around the edges of American society. And the traditional watchdogs—those in public office, the press and citizens groups—are as useless as the perfumed fops of another era who busied their days with court intrigue at Versailles. Canada never looked so good.

We have seen Canadian residents try and help us decide about public health care and tell us the benefits of having public health care for all, the savings in a single payer option and the good medical treatment they personally have had.

The public debate goes on, in many cases full of propaganda and lame excuses like "its not American," to false statements by political servants of the mega profit insurance companies about "death panels" and "long waiting lists for treatment of life threatening disease."

Its important to note that the only people that are insured today that are not bankrupting their income are the bureaucrats and wealthy business owners, the 1% of Americans that own the public wealth. These are the people that rail against a single payer system and say "if you want to get health insurance get a job" or work harder and get a better paying position and all the time they are spouting this rhetoric they have never raised one bead of sweat to earn the health coverage or wealth they enjoy throwing in the working public face. After all its corporate America along with their lobbies and political payoffs that allowed our work to be sent to communist China where they can take advantage of slave labor and crippled our ability to work and support our needs.

The Democrats are collaborating with lobbyists for the insurance industry, the pharmaceutical industry and for-profit health care providers to craft the current health care reform legislation. “Corporate and industry players are inside the tent this time,” says David Merritt, project director at Newt Gingrich’s Center for Health Transformation, “so there is a vacuum on the outside.” And these lobbyists have already killed a viable public option and made sure nothing in the bills will impede their growing profits and capacity for abuse.

“It will basically be a government law that says you have to buy their defective product,” says Dr. David Himmelstein, a professor at Harvard Medical School and a founder of Physicians for a National Health Plan. “Next the government will tell us a Pinto in every garage, a lead-coated toy to every child and melamine-laced puppy chow for every dog.”

When we have the chance to buy cheaper drugs from a foreign country we are told we cannot because they may not be safe yet all our prescription drugs are made in foreign countries and shipped here, many of the new drugs are untested or not tested long enough to find out the effects they may have on people. The FDA continues to push untested drugs on the public like they want to do with the untested swine flu vaccine.

Rick Scott, who paid over a billion dollars for fraud in over charging medicare is now running 20 million ad campaign that is stoking the anger and fear of many Americans.

The U.S. spends twice as much as other industrialized nations on health care—$7,129 per capita—although 45.7 million Americans remain without health coverage and millions more are inadequately covered.

A report in the journal Health Affairs estimates that, if the system is left unchanged, one of every five dollars spent by Americans in 2017 will go to health coverage.

The lobbyists have, as they did with the obscene bailouts for banks and investment firms, hijacked legislation in order to fleece the citizen. The five largest private health insurers and their trade group, America’s Health Insurance Plans, spent more than $6 million on lobbying in the first quarter of 2009. Pfizer, the world’s biggest drug maker, spent more than $9 million during the last quarter of 2008 and the first three months of this year.

The Washington Post reported that up to 30 members of Congress from both parties who hold key committee memberships have major investments in health care companies totaling between $11 million and $27 million. President Barack Obama’s director of health care policy, who will not discuss single-payer as an option, has served on the boards of several health care corporations.

“We are considering a variety of striking efforts for early in the fall,” Dr. Himmelstein said, “including protests outside state capitals by doctors around the country, video links of conferences in 70 or 80 cities around the country, with protests and potential doctors chaining themselves to the fence of the White House.”

Make sure you join them.