I will feel bad for people living in states that opt out of a public insurance option. However it won't help them one bit if people in NO states are given the choice of a public option instead. Understand that I write this as someone who strongly supports establishing a Single Payer, or Medicare for All, public health insurance system in America; NOW. Sure I support that, but I also know that there isn't a prayer of a chance of making that happen, not now.
Call the system unfair, call the game rigged, unless someone has the power to change that system or nullify that game it will be go on being played under the rules in effect. I am not a defeatist, I am a fighter, and mine has been one small voice among many pushing the fight forward in the current session of Congress. I have witnessed our ability to move a mountain, against all seeming insider odds, to keep some form of a public option alive, to expose and reject the false promise of a "trigger to nowhere" being offered us as a sleeping pill instead. Our power is real. And so is the mountain. Our ability to move it slightly helped crack the aura of it's permanent invincibility. But that mountain is still there, pushed a few yards further down the road.
(I am a blogger fellow with Brave New Films on their Sick For Profit campaign. Our new video on WellPoint is at SickForProfit.com.)
News outlets are starting to report on Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield, a subsidiary of WellPoint, suing the state of Maine to guarantee a 3% profit for themselves. Here's a report from the Maine Public Broadcasting Network:
The state and Maine's largest private insurer Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield are locked in a legal battle over how much profit Anthem should be able to make. Earlier this year, Maine's insurance superintendent Mila Kofman denied Anthem's request to raise rates for its individual insurance products, calling it "excessive," and instead approved an increase that leaves Anthem without a profit margin for providing those 12,000 policies. Now Anthem has filed suit to get the decision overturned.
"Superintendent has noted that Anthem's done pretty well." Janet Mills is the Maine Attorney General who is representing the superintendent of insurance. Mills' office counters that Anthem averaged a 3.2 percent profit margin in its individual line of products for the nine years that the company has been in Maine. And that going a year without a profit from those products will not drain the company.
"She found that in fact that had contributed to $17.5 million and that its executives were pocketing rather large salaries and bonuses." Anthem spokesman Chris Dugan did not comment on the lawsuit beyond acknowledging that it had been filed. In a brief filed with the Maine Superior Court, however, Anthem calls a 0 percent profit margin unfair and unprecedented; it says it wants to have a profit margin of at least 3 percent.
The new rates offered by the Maine Superintendent do not prevent Anthem from making a profit; they can do that the same way other companies might do so in a recession, by cutting overhead costs and lowering executive salaries and taking up more efficient management of their business. But as I've reported and as Igor Volsky confirms, Anthem wants the state of Maine to guarantee a 3% profit as a Constitutional right.
I've been working with Brave New Films on their Sick For Profit campaign, exposing the practices and rewards of the insurance industry. It's been pretty eye-opening, and we have a lot more stuff coming in the next few weeks. But we also decided to have a light moment. A couple weeks ago Brave New Films asked for submissions to give CIGNA a more appropriate tag line than their current "A Business of Caring" (in the words of Adam Sandler from the old SNL sketch, "Who are the ad wizards who came up with this one?"). Over 1,600 entries later, we have whittled them down to a few gems.
At Sick For Profit, you can pick the best tag line or submit your own. Here are the front-runners so far:
A business of caring less
Walk it off
Coverage to die for
We deny. You die.
Patients try our patience.
Denying care, one patient at a time
We love you... to death
Your pain is our gain
We put the "Hell" in healthcare
Bend over
With the winning tagline, we'll make CIGNA a new corporate logo, post it on Facebook, and send it to CIGNA execs. Which I'm sure they'll appreciate.
(I am a blogger fellow with Brave New Films on their Sick For Profit campaign. Visit us on Facebook.)
Today Brave New Films released their second installment in the Sick For Profit series, taking a look at the corrupt practices of CIGNA, denying care to their customers while their lead executives rake in millions and lead lavish lifestyles.
Meet Jo Joshua Godfrey. She had cancer without knowing for over a year.
"I would go to CIGNA and they would tell me I had bronchitis and give me medicine and send me home. No matter what medicine they gave me I wouldn't get better. Then the CIGNA Director called me up and she told me that there was nothing wrong with me at all. I called the doctor, and I came with my film and my CAT scan and he just put it in, it took exactly thirty seconds. He told me, 'You have cancer,' and he said the reason CIGNA did not want to give you your records is they've known right way back for years that you have cancer and they're not going to treat you."
CIGNA took in $19.1 billion dollars in revenue last year, with a $292 million dollar income. That doesn't include the salaries given to people like CEO Ed Hanway. He made a cool $12 million last year, and over the past five years he took in $120 million. Hanway has $28 million in unexcercised stock options. The company corporate jets, also not seen in profit statements, cost $68 million. This money is gained, as former communications director Wendell Potter says in this video, through denying claims and dumping the sick, enhancing the value of the company for Wall Street investors. The effect on people's lives, meanwhile, is tragic. Nataline Sarkysian, featured in the Americans United For Change advertisement, lost her life after CIGNA repeated denied her a liver transplant, despite the family having full coverage.
Meet Stephen Coddington, the wife of Marian, a stroke victim:
The case manager at the nursing home called me in and was really upset, and she said, "CIGNA is wanting to discontinue therapy with her. The doctors called and appeals were denied." It has been a day-in and day-out fight. Every talk that I've had with them, it's been, how can we wiggle off this hook.
This is the human cost for an insurance company's existence, for the record profits and supreme lifestyle of their executives. Welcome to the American health insurance industry. Instead of helping policyholders attain the health security they need for their families, big insurance companies get rich by denying coverage to patients. Now they're sending lobbyists to Washington, DC to twist the arms of lawmakers to oppose reform of the status quo. Why? Because the status quo pays.
CIGNA is not a special case in the insurance industry. It's perfectly normal and expected for a corporation to maximize profits. The difference with insurance is that the profit comes at the expense of your health care, and frankly, all the regulations in the world won't substantively change that. The best way to fight back is through exposure, a juxtaposition of the human luxury paid for by human misery.
So help us shine this spotlight. CIGNA's advertising tagline is 'A Business of Caring.' We think they ought to come up with something more appropriate for their actual practices. If you come up with one, post it on our Facebook page. Here are some examples. We'll send the best over to CIGNA. In addition, Jo Joshua Godfrey will join SEIU Healthcare 775NW outside the CIGNA corporate offices in Seattle, Washington today as they demand quality and affordable health care for every American as a fundamental right and not a privilege.
And send this video to your friends. Everyone needs to know what's at stake in health care reform. This kind of denial of coverage can happen to anyone under the current system.
(This is the latest in a series as part of Brave New Films' Sick For Profit campaign. Follow us on Facebook.)
This week, the insurance industry let a bit of their guard down, as they ramped up their efforts to attack anything meaningful in health care reform. As the Los Angeles Times reported that negotiations in the Senate Finance Committee were turning the bill into a "bonanza" for insurers, the industry tried to cement those gains by using fake grassroots tactics to portray an imagined outcry against real reforms like the public option.
UnitedHealth Group, subject of a scathing profile by Keith Olbermann this week, admitted it was turning its employees into lobbyists by distributing anti-public option talking points to them, and encouraging them to engage in anti-reform protests.
The New York Times published a very nice press release from the desk of Humana, one of the nation's largest health insurance companies. The reporter interviewed a bunch of employees at Humana, all of whom were horrified to see themselves depicted as "villains" in the health care debate. I agree with Yves Smith, this is an absurd angle for a story, an extreme example of selection bias. The people who work at Humana probably have a sense that their employer, um, pays their salary, and thusly, what's good for the employer is probably good for them. Similarly, most people hold a favorable opinion of themselves just as a matter of getting through the day. Not to mention the fact that their understanding of the functioning of Humana is limited to their job description. It is not possible to gain much of a perspective on the health care debate or industry practices by asking a midlevel manager "Do you think you're the worst person alive?"
(I am a blogger fellow for Brave New Films on their Sick For Profit campaign, exposing the obscene profits of the insurance industry generated through denying care to their customers. Follow us on Facebook.)
This week, the insurance companies started to display their true colors in the health care debate. Specifically, United Health Group, whose CEO owns three-quarter of a billion dollars in unexercised stock options, sent a letter to their employees asking them to speak to an "advocacy specialist" about health care reform. Employees who called the hotline received information about attending right-wing tea parties.
A source who's insured by UHG-and who also obtained the letter-called the hotline on Tuesday and says the company directed him to an events list hosted by the right wing America's Independent Party, and suggested he attend an anti-health care reform tea party sponsored by religious fundamentalist Dave Daubenmire, scheduled for today outside the office of Blue Dog Rep. Zack Space (D-OH).
When questioned about this, UHG admitted that they are directing their employees to oppose the public option, but didn't send them off to tea parties. Remember, companies like UHG claimed to resist union "intimidation" when opposing the Employee Free Choice Act. Intimidation of their own workers, I suppose, is AOK.
While insurance companies claim to be on the side of reform in this debate, they merely want to funnel government subsidies to their companies, in a forced market with an individual mandate and no competition, leaving them free to deny care to line their own pockets. Their conservative allies in Congress don't even want to go that far - they are objectively pro-discrimination and resist forcing insurers to stop denying coverage based on pre-existing conditions, or rescinding paying customers when they want to use their insurance. (By the way, if insurance companies honestly wanted to end these practices, they could do so right now.)
Henry Waxman has had enough. He wants information from insurance companies on the obscene profits they are making on the backs of the sick.
The intellectual godfather of the modern conservative movement was Russell Kirk, and Kirk's great hero was the political theorist Edmund Burke, who fervently supported King George and the other royalty of the late 1700s in their battle with the forces of democracy. Kirk, in his book The Conservative Mind, noted that Burke "was not ashamed to acknowledge the allegiance of humble men whose sureties are prejudice and prescription." No, indeed. In fact, the conservative movement has always been a happy mix of wealthy elites and angry bigots, working together to defend the status quo and the power of those elites. Today, this coalition rears its ugly head once again, as super-wealthy insurance executives supply angry right wingers the money to organize themselves to disrupt town hall meetings and physically intimidate Congresspeople.
Erudite elitist William Buckley was delighted to align himself with Southern segregationists, writing columns strongly defending them. Ronald Reagan raised most of his money from big business, but was pleased to go to the town in Mississippi where James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner were murdered, and give a speech about states' rights. And John McCain said nothing while people in his crowds were yelling racial slurs and calling out in reference to Obama "Kill him."
Now insurance company execs are thrilled and excited to be sending money out to right wing groups to organize the Birthers and their ilk to shout down citizens coming to town hall meetings to discuss health care reform with their members of Congress.
It's time to take our democracy back from this combination of big money and their truly extreme allies. It's time to take this unholy alliance on, and beat it. If we let this coalition run our country, we are in deep trouble.
Late Saturday night, I wrote a blog post called So Far So Good, and had it time stamped for 9:00 AM Sunday morning. That post discussed- among other things- how so far the Obama White House had been hanging tough and fighting for a strong comprehensive health care bill. I then went to bed and slept late, rolled slowly out of bed, got ready for a busy weekend, and finally sat down to read the Washington Post late morning. There on the front page was an article, full of unnamed background sources of course, about how the Obama team had pretty much given up on bigger reform plans, and was scaling back their ambitions- very depressing. I thought to myself, “hell, should I go rewrite that post?” Then about an hour later, I read the encouraging NYT article re how putting the toughest parts of health care reform into reconciliation so that it would only require 51 votes was still a live round. As with the WP article, it was full of unnamed sources, so it too was hard to tell what the truth of the article was.
This is what we are going to see on health care in the next 6 weeks- some stories that look good for real reform, some that look bad, and no way to tell which are more accurate. We won’t know form moment whether we are winning or not.
Then there are the literally thousands of field events around the country with health care as the big topic- town halls, rallies, debates, congresspeople speaking at all kinds of events back home. Every single one of them will be a pitched battle between pro-reform activists and the (truly, deeply) strange bedfellow coalition of insurance company Astroturf money in league with the birthers and various other nutty far right wingers. The latter coalition has put out a field manual on how to disrupt events, make lots of noise, appear to outnumber the reformers even when they don’t, and generally intimidate members of congress. The other day they did a good job of this at an event in PA with Kathleen Sebelius. Our side needs to be ready for these tactics, and we need to beat their intensity level. This is a policy battle, a communications battle, a turnout battle, a political battle all rolled into one- quite possibly the most important issue fight of our lifetimes, because winning this one not only gets us decent health care in this country, but sets the stage for winning the big fights of the future against the big business/birther coalition. It will go one way, then the other, and we won’t know until it’s over which side has won the day.
This country’s future is on the line this August: does the money of the insurance industry combined with the craziness of the birthers win the day? Or do the reformers working to change things for the better win the day? And for all you blue dog Democrats and conservative Senate Democrats, you have to decide too- which side are you on? I hope all of you who are on the reformer side join the battle in the most active way you possibly can. This recess really is the ballgame.
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