They Sold Their Souls
You cannot deal with the insurance industry – they corrupt the system. They have had the government force people to pay for insurance, but have no intention of honoring their agreements, if you do manage to get insurance.
Badtux has another nice rant on health insurance, Why are Americans so unhealthy?, and the Shrubbery is demonstrating the adherence to the insurance industry line of the GOP with a veto today, and a promised veto for another bill.
As expected, today the Shrubbery vetoed the SCHIP bill:
The president had promised to veto it, saying the Democratic bill was too costly, took the program too far from its original intent of helping the poor, and would entice people now covered in the private sector to switch to government coverage. He wants only a $5 billion increase in funding.
Bush argued that the congressional plan would be a move toward socialized medicine by expanding the program to higher-income families.
You can add “socialized medicine” to the ever-growing file of things the Shrubbery doesn’t understand.
The bill allows states to determine the upper limit of the program to a maximum of four times the poverty level. States with low median incomes don’t like it because it looks like a give away to wealthy states. The truth is that you can generally live pretty well at twice the poverty level in some states, but can barely make it in a state like Maryland at three times the poverty level because of the local cost of living. The poverty level is a national number and takes no notice of the costs of the local area.
Ana Maria at A.M. in the Morning! notes that the Hedgemony has also announced opposition to the multiple peril insurance legislation. This adds wind coverage to the existing Federal flood insurance program. You have to insurance to re-build or get a mortgage, but the insurance companies don’t want to sell it to you.
Again, the veto is to protect the right of insurance companies to charge you exorbitant rates and then ignore your losses or to refuse you coverage. The Federal government was forced to provide flood insurance in the first place because insurance companies refused to cover it. The companies don’t want to provide you with the insurance, but they don’t want the government to do it either.
Let’s be clear – if the insurance companies were actually providing a competitive product, none of this legislation would be necessary. The fact that the companies have decided to be nothing but large day-traders, using policyholders’ money, rather than actual insurance companies, is the problem.
17 comments
We definitely need some reform in the insurance industry. From what I hear you cannot get insurance in NOLA as most if not all the big insurance companies are refusing to operate there. More people need to see how well “socialized medicine” works in the rest of the civilized world.
The large insurance companies aren’t writing policies in any of the coastal areas if they can avoid it [there are states in which they are required to offer policies if they want to do any business in the state]. They got the regulations passed that require insurance coverage, and now they don’t want to sell it. Governments are being forced to step in to cover the gaps.
All of the standard economic models and rules say single payer systems are cheaper and more efficient than what is going on now. we need “one policy to rule them all.”
Honestly, here’s my situation. I’m a medical patient that gets an infusion every two weeks. I have to deal with my medical system. I try to be nice to them.
I can’t attack Kaiser Permanente, even if I wanted to, and I don’t. They have an e-mail system which lets me contact my doctors with questions, something that is very helpful to someone like me. I was briefly misdiagnosed with osteoporosis. Had I not been able to do independent research and present it to the doctors, I might have been prescribed drugs that would hurt me.
I do not fault KP for the misdiagnosis, that was a single orthopedist who could be working in any system. I credit KP for having the e-mail system that lets me document my concerns.
You’re fortunate to have the coverage and nothing about a single payer system would alter your situation because it covers how things are paid for, not how things are done.
My Mother has Medicare and Tricare [the military system]. She selects her own doctors [or is referred] and has freedom of communication with them. She could use one of the group practice clinics if she wanted, but chooses to go “a la carte.”
It isn’t about health care providers, it is about health care funding. Insurance companies don’t provide the health care, they provide the funding.
Well, Bryan, that’s not how Kaiser Permanente works. It’s not a traditional insurance system, they have their own hospital and clinics. They are my health care provider, not just my insurer.
If the national health system wants to take over medical payments and accounting, I’m sure Kaiser could divest that part.
I’m familiar with Kaiser from living in SoCal. They aren’t going to refuse the money, no matter what the source.
Kaiser, BTW, is what socialized medicine looks like – they hire the doctors and control everything, just like the National Health Service in Britain.
I’m glad someone is making that distinction clearly. No wonder Hillary burst into laughter when some GOPer described her proposal as “socialized medicine…” so did I.
I had one encounter with actual socialized medicine, in Austria in 1978. On the whole, it was a very satisfactory encounter, to the extent one can judge anything when one is as sick as the proverbial dog. And I was merely a legal resident for a summer, the kind of person the GOP back home would have argued didn’t deserve public medical care. But the Austrians gave it to me, at a very reasonable cost.
I have no dog in the race regarding the generalities of the system we end up with. I don’t care if it fits in one or another “-ism”; health care is not intrinsically ideological for me. I don’t care, in general, how I pay for it, through taxes or privately, as long as the system is reasonably efficient and distributes both care and costs fairly.
OTOH, I care a great deal about getting good care for a price everyone can afford. Most of us are getting neither of those now. And the private insurance companies are making out like bandits… indeed, they are bandits.
Health care is unlike any other service. It is not like auto repair. There is no body of evidence showing that pooling all our resources would enable us to negotiate better prices for brake jobs; competition does an adequate job there. But there is in my opinion overwhelming evidence that we could do better in health care by cutting out the for-profit middlemen from the payment process. Only a seriously broken political process allows a medical care payment system as disastrous as our current one to continue in place.
For what it’s worth, whig, I pay a friggin’ fortune for individual private insurance. Sometimes that’s what one has to do as an independent contractor with no spouse whose insurance one can ride on. The closer I get to not being able to afford insurance at all, the better all the other systems… France’s, Britain’s, Canada’s… look to me.
And what Bush just did to the children with his SCHIP veto should earn him a free trip to Hell. (Too bad I don’t believe in Hell.)
While the emergency battlefield care is the best in the world, the military health care system is socialized medicine and the standard care has one annoying problem – you can’t always get the doctor you want, you get the doctor they assign to you.
The GOP keeps taking about choice, but most of the insurance plans in this area tell you which doctors you can see and which labs you have to use for tests. That is really annoying.
Indeed, with K-P I have to use their doctors and clinics and hospitals and everything. It’s socialized medicine in the small, with all the worst irritances of the British health system, including the fact that English is not the native language of most of the doctors and very few of the doctors graduated from American medical schools (the latter actually bothers me more than the former, American medical schools still have much higher standards than Pakistani or Indian medical schools irregardless of what K-P tries to say).
Furthermore I don’t have any choice. My employer chooses my insurance, not me.
I’m just waiting for the Governator to leave office so that his Democratic successor can sign the Canadian-style health insurance bill that the Governator has already vetoed once. The Governator has proposed a Massachusetts-style RomneyHillaryCare system, but the Democrats in the state lege aren’t buying it — they look at Massachusetts and see a mess.
-Badtux the Health Penguin
When I was an employee, I don’t remember anyone asking me who I wanted heath coverage with, I got a Blue Cross/Blue Shield card with my ID and pamphlet on the system.
The Massachusetts experiment is going to be helpful for fighting what Hillary proposes and all of the insurance based systems. You can’t require private insurance companies to cover people they don’t want, so you are going to end up with an “assigned risk pool” just like car insurance.
We are seeing foreign doctors and nurses even down here and the interaction with the local version of English is not a pretty sight.
Steve, I paid a fortune for health insurance in Pennsylvania. I pay less than half as much for insurance in California. The difference is that in California, Kaiser was required (as all insurers are in this state) to offer their two most popular policies to HIPAA-qualified patients with pre-existing conditions, albeit at extra cost. I am not covered through my wife, so I’m not sure where that came from. For awhile in Pennsylvania, I was, kind of…because Highmark kicked me out of their insurance pool, we created a corporation, made my wife a sole corporate officer and joined the chamber of commerce in order to force Highmark to issue a policy. That was over a thousand dollars a month, plus chamber dues.
That is the basic problem for a lot of people – if you are ever diagnosed with anything, you become tagged as “existing condition” and without intervention you can’t get insurance. You would be out of luck in Florida.
I’d be out of luck in California if I didn’t do my legal research and tell Kaiser that they were required to cover me, because they won’t tell you how to get covered, and they deny knowledge of it until you tell them the law.
What is truly remarkable is when you cite the specific law, they immediately *do* know.
Of course, I was born with my condition, and my sister-in-law sent me a law that in California means I should not have been forced into the HIPAA-pool at all (genetic diseases are protected), but I don’t want to be a bastard to KP and force them to drop my rates. Maybe I should, but I already feel kind of bad being as expensive to treat as I am.
Yeah, it’s pretty amazing how citing specific laws improves memories when dealing with businesses.
I have an acquaintance who did a lot of business flying and he had cards printed with the various rules regarding what airlines had to do when they screwed up. He claimed it saved him a lot of time trying to reason with gate attendants.