I Got A Raise
If Congress can keep the government running for a while, I will be getting a raise in my check next year. It is bigger than I thought it would be because the premium for Medicare Part B went down. That’s right, the premium for that “terrible, inefficient government health insurance” came down a bit. It won’t pay for a coffee at Starbucks, but it is better than the increases that everyone else with health insurance is paying.
Why did it come down, well, because the cost of the system came down and it is not a for-profit insurance company, so the savings went to reduced premiums, rather than CEO salary, or corporate profits. This happened once or twice when I originally had Blue Cross / Blue Shield, because they were a mutual insurance company at the time, i.e. the policy holders were the stock holders.
As someone who buys a lot of cat food, I can tell you that the raise doesn’t cover the cost of the price increases I’ve seen in the last year, but it helps.
4 comments
I always have to laugh when people say that BC/BS is a non-profit company. BS/BC is allowed to make a 12% profit. The have offices full of bean counters to ensure that they expense out all but the 12%. That’s a pretty damn good margin when your talking about billions of dollars of income.
Ah, yes, the wonderful ‘cost plus’ contract, the least efficient and most wasteful system ever devised. If you can do a job for $100, you make $12 dollars, but if you can figure out how to spend $1000 on the exact same job, you make $120. Lots of incentive to be efficient in that model [/snark]
“Cost plus” are the type of contracts that big defense corporations get to supply the military.
BC/BS used to be non-profit mutual insurance companies, but they were turned to ‘the dark side’ during the 1980s and ’90s, becoming for-profit corporations.
as someone else who buys a lot of cat food [i just left $140 behind at the pet store tonight, but at least that included cat litter and extra special expensive sensitive tummy dog food too], i can remember when that raise actually bought a noticeable amount of cat food and it wasn’t all that long ago either.
probably you’re better off thinking of it as an extra bit of catnip instead. we’re all going to need more happy pills to survive this economy.
Those are going up too, Hipparchia, while the economy stays in a ditch.
The GOP in the House just reneged on another ‘deal’ that was made with the Senate, and tried to divert attention from what they did. No one is buying their excuses anymore. They are screwing people over for blatantly political reasons, and don’t even have the humanity to be ashamed of themselves.
The only people who would believe that 89 Senators would vote for a bill that they didn’t think would be passed by the House, needs their meds adjusted. Even some of the Republican Senators are complaining about the House.