Blue Shield of California intends to raise rates for individual policy holders by as much as 59% this year. This news is stunning. These are the people Barack Obama wants to legally force us to give more money to.
San Francisco-based Blue Shield said the increases were the result of fast-rising healthcare costs and other expenses resulting from new healthcare laws.
We no longer need any more evidence that the system is broken and has been made worse by Obamacare. Oh, and I won’t let the GOP off either. The chances that the Republicans will do anything sane and humane about health care are next to nil. We will hear a round of stupidity about allowing the ‘market’ to dictate prices..as if human health was controlled by the Austrian economic cult. It is the unchecked market, the bonecrushing inadequacies of Obamacare, and out right greed that is imploding our health care system. Sick people cannot, in a civilized society, be turned into a profit/loss stat for an insurance company.
Should these increases continue the insurance cabal is digging its own grave. Individuals will be forced out of the market, and companies will be forced to drop coverage for employees. The biggest lie of Obamacare is that 90 some odd percent of us will be insured. With what money? The problem isn’t lack of insurance. The problem is insurance.
The horror of all of this is that the opportunity to put a system in place that might actually work was blown up in 2010 by shills, imbeciles and frauds. First and foremost among them: Barack Obama, who serviced those who paid for his election while breaking nearly every promise he made on health care.
The trillions spent bailing out the greedy, soulless fucks who imploded the economy could have been spent setting up a public option, which would have, in turn, forced Blue Shield to build a better mouse trap. And yes, the rich can pay more taxes. Some of them ought to be writing checks right now – from prison.
U.P.S. competes with the post office. U.P.S. is better. But I have the option of the post office. It’s not as fast. It makes more mistakes. But chances are my letter will get where it is going. Boston College competes with U Mass Boston. If I can’t get into B.C. or can’t afford to I can go get a reasonable college education at U Mass Boston for far fewer dollars. Toll roads are quicker than freeways. If I want to pony up the dough, I use a toll road. I have the option of a freeway. We have, as a group, decided to pay for these things because we’ve decided the common welfare demands it. We must do the same thing with health care.
The ObamaDemGOPInsurance fiends will suck us dry unless we demand an alternative. We can afford it. Start by lopping off 2 rings of the Pentagon – to paraphrase John Bolton. Demand the end to corporate “individuality” and publicly finance all elections so we can actually have representatives that work for us, not Blue Cross and Exxon. Stop illegal immigration. Yes, stop it. We cannot afford it. Period. And we could do it. We have over 700 overseas military bases. 700. Perhaps 500 would do. Ditch the Department of Education. It is worthless. Get the hell out of Afghanistan. That alone would save a huge amount of money. Trillions will be spent between now and the time we leave - after ‘losing’ anyway. No more bailouts of mega companies…ever. It is rank bullshit that any bailout saved the economy. What they did was turn acute, limited pain into long term suffering, while saving a bunch of smug smart asses from the consequences of their amoral actions. Finally, raise taxes on the rich.
There is a way to create a humane healthcare system. It would be imperfect but it would be saner than what is happening now. The name of our era will end up being “Screwing the Middle Class for fun and profit.” The leaches must be stopped.
“The problem isn’t lack of insurance. The problem is insurance.”
I love how you get right to the heart of the problem. Absolutely agree with you.
Outstanding John! And ditto what imust said! (waving at imust!)
Hey PMM! Sorry I missed your debut on the Radio Show! I catch it next time!
You can listen in the archives imust!
If we had universal health care, there’d be no need for insurance. Everyone would benefit, but, alas, a few tapeworms would have to stop sucking the life out of America.
Time to administer a dewormer.
Good idea- and we need to remember that a good worming program is ongoing- needs to be repeated on a regular basis to avoid re-infestation.
Ivermectin is $1.99 for a 1200 lbs. dosage tube.
Assuming an average weight of 200 lbs. per congressmen, that’s only about $267 per annum to get the infestation of worms out of Capital Hill! (I’ll gladly pay.)
As for the White House, I think they need to drape one of those circus tents over it and fumigate.
Do we go with Ivermectin or do we need the praziquantel?
I would be happy to help administer the doses!
My vet swears by a 3x rotation of 2 ivermectins, followed by 1 pyrantel pamoate. Anything, even Quest, would reduce the infestation of our current legislative body!
ROFL! We do Ivermectin New Year’s and Labor Day- and a praziquantel or other on Memorial Day. Then a daily – Strongid C2X or Continuex from last frost to first freeze.
Our horse (Morgan mare) is boarded out because of my back- I miss watching her in the snow!
If your back trouble is permanent, it may be time for a TN Walker.
But I do love Morgans. I have a lovely Morab mare.
Tamer, are you suggesting SPUHC? WTF you talking about Willis? Don’t you know that SPUHC is evil socialism? Do you want the Teaparty to descend upon you, speaking in tongues and exorcise your Socialist/Communist demons. Do you want Barack Obama’s new Chief of Staff, the handmaiden of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, to call for your blasphemous skull on a stick? Good Americans must not stifle the free market, because everyone know the American free market isn’t free and only a socialist/commie would deny the free market from dictating outrageous prices. Those who can afford healthcare, WILL, those who can’t, WILL DIE, that’s the American Christocracy Democracy in action. Love it or leave it, you godless heathens.
Damn straight! I’m the mo evilist socialist you evah met!
Just eliminate profit from the equation.
No one should be getting rich from suffering.
Eminent domain all the hospitals and make all the doctors and nurses government employees. Get out or Iraq and Afghanistan to pay their salaries, those two wars are on the budget for the duration anyway.
That would end any need for heath insurance companies. The car insurance companies could forward that chunk of change they collect for medical bills too, and that part of your home owners policy and workmans comp and every other bit of money the bastards take.
Set a price the gov is willing to pay for all the drugs.
If you think that would end “INNOVATION” the only drugs they seem to be working on are boner drugs or ones that the side affects for your acne medication is you might die.
A brilliant plan!
The current state of drug R&D proves that the profit motive does not work for the good of all. The big Pharmas also only develop drugs you need to take for the rest of your life, not ones that cure in one short course.
Pharmas also charge the same for a 100-, 200- or 400 mg dosage pill. So kindly doctors prescribe the higher dosages so their patients can cut the pills at home. So the pharmas go and make their pills impossible to cut with a simple knife. So people sell pill-cutting jigs. So the pharmas go and make each pill a crazy shape so they won’t fit in the pill-cutter. My neighbor now is a distributor for an Austrian-made pill cutter that handles every crazy shape.
If we were a small tribe of 30 or 300 members, instead of a country of 300 million, what’dya think would happen to the guy who preyed on the weak & the old in our tribe?
Damn! It didn’t take them long after Speaker Boner and the new House were sworn in, did it?
BTW: Matt Taibbi has an excellent piece on Speaker Boner at Rolling Stone.
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/matt-taibbi-the-crying-shame-of-john-boehner-20110105
I’m fluent in German — his name IS pronounced “Boner”, and is totally appropriate. He’s epitome of everything sick and wrong with the GOP.
GOP be hatin’ on us.
Care to throw an umlaut in there somewhere?
Fällst du hättest gar wünschst, daß ich Umläute für Herr Dr. Frankenstein’s Muhe geben könnte, denn würde ich gerne gerne eine Haufe menge von dieser merkwürdige Diaklensten geben!
Aw shit…let me copy that to babble fish.
I don’t think babblefish did so well:
Either my Berliner dialect, &/or spelling, &/or Babblefish fails in the breach.
“In case you really wanted me, in consideration of all of Dr. Frankenstein’s efforts, to offer umlauts, then I’d gladly give a huge pile of these unusual declensianal marks!”
Ah, no it’s not necessary. But I love how umlauts sound when the words are spoken, even more so when German is sung.
I have/had 2 German friends and at one time toyed with the idea of transferring as a Fed employee to Germany. In an effort to prepare for this possible employment I ordered a “learn a language” set of cassettes from Amazon. Sadly I was working full time and going part time to school in the evening and it turned out to be a bit too much. Then the idea sort of fell apart as I became more and more of a care-giver for parents. Still would love to visit some day.
Do the Mosel, not the Rhein.
Avoid Heidelberg.
Rothenberg is a must.
Visit Franconia, skip Munich.
Bremen & Lübeck are nice.
Berlin is a must, & really fun.
Vienna is magnificent.
A commenter at Gawker said he or she went to school with one of the Boehner kids, and it’s “Boner.”
Good God. That piece is horrific. Somehow, someway I hope and pray the sane tea partiers and what’s left of the sane left can get together and fight these people. We can fight over our differences after…
sane tea partiers Are there such?
I think the article showed just how totally corrupt the entire process is. One way they could start: Public funding for elections, no ifs ands or buts. It’s that way or else. Then you would see a reduction of the amount of time the politicians had to spend on fund-raising efforts. Just sayin’.
Thinking of a Carlin routine. Jumbo Shrimp? Military Intelligence? Sane Tea Partyers?
Now which is the correct spelling: Partyers or partiers? We must be absolutely correct on this.
I am Cornholio! I need the TP Party for my bunghole!
Hell, NY already is ahead of California. Blue Cross already did their number on us last year, and again this year. You might remember when the press covered the big fuss over the rate increases they planned for March of last year in CA. Well our “leaders” were too busy taking contributions to complain and our 32+% rate increases went through right under the radar. Then they announced another one for this month. NY must be thrilled they are ahead of California in finding another way to shaft people. You know how NY and CA love to compete at finding ways to tip people upside down and take all the money that falls out of their pockets.
I think I’ve figured out what Barack meant when he promised his program would reduce everybody’s premiums by $2500 a year. He meant first it will raise them by $5000 and then reduce them by $2500. That Barack. He’s so honest!
W hat is not being mentioned is that folks who ‘cannot afford’ Obamacare will be given either gov’t subsidies or ‘tax’ breaks. Since they likely don’t pay taxes anyway, the latter is pretty misleading. Why not just put working people on Medicare, which is not ‘free’, but is low cost, and put the unemployed on Medicaid? The cost of medicare to those still working should be higher than retirees pay, but would still be a bargain.
My dh had an interesting idea, why not make all health insurance illegal ?
Doctors would go back to driving Chevrolets and making house calls. This is not necessarily a bad thing.
You have to be impoverished to get Medicaid—no assets, not just no income.
You’re partly right, John.
The problem isn’t strictly speaking insurance. The problem is that we long ago stopped treating medical insurance as insurance. Obama himself got this almost right during his silly health care pow-wow last year. Insurance is a hedge against large expenses. As the President said, it exists so you don’t go bankrupt from unexpected things. From there, he lost it completely. And apparently so have most others in this country. We don’t expect health insurance to be insurance. We expect health insurance to cover everything, without extra cost from us. Well that ain’t insurance. That’s wanting someone else to pay all your bills for you. It’s wellfare. Under that standard, health care costs cannot help but increase.
Add Obamacare to the mix, and it gets worse. You act surprised that “insurance” costs are rising spectacularly, but that was incredibly predictable. When you forbid, as Obamacare does, insurance companies who work under the model of paying all expenses instead of just paying for large ones (and both state and federal regulations forbid them from doing anything else) from exercising judgment about who they will cover and who they will not (ie – when you forbid non-coverage for pre-existing conditions), that will, without fail, cause all premiums to go up. It is inevitable. You decryt it as somehow deriving solely from EVIL, but it’s not. A company can’t stay in business any other way, under the conditions that they are forced to do business in. You might as well fight against the turning of the seasons. Fighting the laws of economics will be just as successful.
” That’s wanting someone else to pay all your bills for you.”
That’s wanting everyone’s health to be taken care of.
“It’s wellfare.”
You say that like it’s a bad thing.
“health care costs cannot help but increase.”
Actually, under Single Payer, heath care costs go DOWN. Because profit motive is not longer a factor.
Alexi……Insurance, no matter what sort of insurance it is, is nothing but a bet. You’re betting the insurance company that your expenses will exceed your premiums, they’re better you that they will not. HOW DO YOU THINK Isurance companies pocket such huge profits? They do so because most people pay out more in premium than benefit received. PERIOD!!!!
You write “Insurance is a hedge against large expenses”, no it isn’t, and it isn’t because the consumer didn’t change the rules, the insurance companies changed the rules to excelerate THEIR profit margin, not to save you money or to have your back. It began to go wrong nearly 40 years ago with HMO’s. Health Insurers discovered that if they could manage payment to entire groups of providers and facilities with procedure, medication and process schedules, they could make even more monies then with traditional major medical insurance. Ordinary folks didn’t change the rules, Insurance companies changed the rules, with the help of Congress.
Stand alone Major Medical (catastrophic) Insurance is difficult to find and even more difficult to get. If you have any sort of pre-existing condition that could lead to a major event, you’ll either have an astronomical insurance premium or you’ll be denied. Only the people who statistically don’t need it can get it.
The disgrace in our society is that when people are denied health insurance because of pre-existing conditions or they’re frozen out of the market due to cost versus benefit, they can’t find decent healthcare anywhere. The system has been redesigned over the past 40 years to benefit Big Insurance, Big Pharma and For Profit Providers, when it should have been redesigned to benefit the consumer. You can’t blame the consumer for that and you can’t call that “welfare”. Corporations own nearly all access to healthcare and they will agree to nothing that strikes at the heart of their MONEY! The only way we take back our human right to access to decent, affordable healthcare is to PUT DOWN THE RABID DOG and bury it once and for all.
P.S. to Alexi……Some of us are actually old enough to remember when you could go to a doctor and be charged according to your means. Docs and hospitals would worked out re-payment schedules for their patients. Hospitals and docs served the poor FOC. Imagine that!!!. Now it’s about getting rich or getting richer and too many Docs and hospitals are in the pocket of Health Insurers, Big Pharma, Big Medical Equipment providers and For Profit Hospitals. It’s a racket, a huge racket and we’re the victims.
My grandfather and two of his brothers were doctors. They treated many charity patients over the course of their careers and felt it was their obligation as doctors to do so. During the Great Depression, they would often accept a sack of potatoes or a basket of eggs as payment. They went on lots of house calls, too – sometimes in the middle of the night. BTW, they all managed to make very good incomes and still treat a % of patients for free. Try to find a doctor who will do that now!
And I can tell you from personal experience. that those men in your family were BELOVED, respected and admired by the people they served, to the point of being put on a pedestal, because they were real heroes. There aren’t enough of those sort of docs around anymore.
Our neighbor was just the type of doctor you’ve been talking about. He was 90 years old and still practicing and making house calls until the end. There was a front page article about him in the paper the other day.
http://community.adn.com/adn/node/155148
He came to see my mother (no charge) winter before last when she was sick. Though he only had to walk across the street, LOL. He lived in the same small house for over 50 years. Never “upgraded” his lifestyle. Though that house was overlooking a lagoon with a great view, and he was quite an accomplished landscape painter. So he probably always felt there was no better place.
He came to Alaska in 1948, when there were only about a dozen doctors in Anchorage, and helped found the first hospital. Even with all his clout, whatever is happening in the health care system up here (and everywhere in the country) he was powerless to stop. The last time my mom went to his office she was charged $500 for less than a ten minute visit, with no tests. My parents were shocked. They knew that was not like him (after 40+ years) and that the new rules of the group/hospital were beyond his control. We tend to think that must have hastened his death, as well. To witness things go so awry, and to not be able to see patients he had been seeing for over 60 years because his group didn’t accept Medicare.
He had a sense of humor and really took the time to get to know people and their concerns. Never rushed. He was quite a character. And, no…they don’t make them like that anymore. He will certainly be missed.
We expect health insurance to cover everything, without extra cost from us.
There is cost to us: It is called premiums, co-pays and deductibles.
Yeah the co-pay con. First you pay thousands of dollars in premiums, plus additional if you opt for prescription drug coverage, then you must meet your deductible for medical, all the while paying an office visit co-pay. It’s even more absurd with drugs. People pay hundreds of dollars a month for pharmaceuticals that cost only pennies to manufacture.
The insurance companies claim to be negotiating with docs, hospitals and big pharma for better prices, when it’s obvious to any reasonable mind that they’re not negotiating prices, they’re setting prices to line their own pockets. Big Pharma spends an astronomical amount of dollars advertising cures for everything from psorisis, to incontinence, to erecticle dysfunction, to cholesterol, to bone rebuilders and then the docs sell it to you as something you MUST have and the insurance companies add it to their formularies so that you can see that it’s covered (after you pay the co-pay) under your plan. What a total con and rip off.
I’m afraid until we’re a people with the balls to boycott health insurance, we’re just spinning our wheels here.
If enough people cancelled their policies, things would change and quickly.
Now here come the reasons why that can’t happen….
I’d like to see someone set up a private, non-profit health insurance program (Buffett? Gates? Oprah? Facebook Boy?). That’d put the bastards out of business pretty quick.
There has to be some option for coverage of catastrophic injury or illness if people are going to join your boycott. Unions try to keep large funds on hand, so when their members strike, they can get paid a little.
Which begs the question… what are people willing to risk for the country they want to create?
Pingback: Tweets that mention Shills, imbeciles and frauds | JohnWSmart -- Topsy.com