Don't Let Some Government Bureaucrat Stand Between You And Your Doctor!

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1. Wendell Potter: A Bureaucrat Who Stood Between You and Your Doctor

Wendell Potter: A Bureaucrat Who Stood Between You and Your Doctor

by citisven

Jul 14, 2009

REP. JOHN BOEHNER: The forthcoming plan from Democratic leaders will make health care more expensive, limit treatments, ration care, and put bureaucrats in charge of medical decisions rather than patients and doctors.

SEN. MITCH MCCONNELL: Americans need to realize that when someone says "government option," what could really occur is a government takeover that soon could lead to government bureaucrats denying and delaying care, and telling Americans what kind of care they can have.

REP. TOM PRICE: We don't want to put the government, we don't want to put bureaucrats between a doctor and a patient.


Here's the kicker though: Not all bureaucrats are equal. The traditional government bureaucrat, at least in theory, is a public servant, bound to administer resources and enforce rules entrusted to him/her by elected officials. The corporate bureaucrat, on the other hand, is bound by one principle only: To make his company's shareholders happy, aka to maximize profit.

So we have in effect two sets of bureaucrats: The government bureaucrats who we all know to be bureaucrats and who are openly bureaucratic — what you see is what you get. Then we have the corporate bureaucrats and their government enablers, who hide behind the veil of freedom, choice and non-bureaucracy but who are really just bureaucrats with different masters — Wall Street. How about calling them shadow bureaucrats...?

Their marketing strategy is brilliantly twisted: Keep evoking the meme of the stuffy old government bureaucrat (which of course no longer applies anyway, see DMV & USPS) to distract from the fact that, as in this case, our health care system has been driven into the ground by corporate bureaucrats. It's the ultimate case of doubling down, an old propaganda tool along the lines of telling people the big lie, because they won't believe the small one.

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2009/7/14/752829/-Wendell-Potter:-A-Bureaucrat-Who-Stood-Between-You-and-Your-Doctor

[redqueen]

2. "$2 billion in profits in 12 weeks..."

If true, how is that in any way defensible?

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=102&topic_id=3989908&mesg_id=3989908

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3. from your post

Drugmakers May Fund $100 Million Ad

July 28, 2009

Representative Henry Waxman, a California Democrat and chairman of a House committee writing health-care legislation, said this month that the deal Pfizer and other companies made to discount brand-name drugs for the elderly with gaps in Medicare prescription coverage was “really a Senate agreement.”

The industry’s $80 billion pledge was negotiated with Senator Max Baucus, a Montana Democrat who is chairman of the Senate Finance Committee and senior White House aides. Baucus is struggling to reach a bipartisan deal on his panel before the Aug. 7 recess.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&sid=aHMaDF4PRvMQ


BLUE DOG BAUCUS ... and there you have it.

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4. Howard Dean on His Prescription for Real Healthcare Reform

Howard Dean on His Prescription for Real Healthcare Reform

July 17, 2009

HOWARD DEAN: Well, again, we talked a little bit about that. The only place that there’s a bureaucrat between you and your doctor right now is in the private health insurance industry. It does not happen in the government-, public-run option. So, you know, I think that he’s right. He is a whistleblower. And this is true. The insurance companies don’t want this, because they know it’s—look, the insurance companies, unfortunately, are about making money for themselves. They really don’t care very much about patient care. And that’s been—


AMY GOODMAN: The problem is, they are paying—what was the Washington Post exposé – “The nation’s largest insurers, hospitals and medical groups have hired more than 350 former government staff members”—


HOWARD DEAN: Right.

http://www.democracynow.org/2009/7/17/gov_howard_dean_on_his_prescription

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5. Wendell Potter on COUNTDOWN right now with Howard Dean

Discussing insurance industry and health care reform.

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6. GOP Solution

[SammyWinstonJack]

8. Then they'll send the bill for the flowers to the families of the uninsured.

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10. a bill for the flowers, that's family values for you

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7. Health Insurance Stocks Soar on Baucus Deal News

Health Insurance Stocks Soar on Baucus Deal News

Tuesday July 28, 2009

News that Senator Max Baucus' Finance Committee deal on health care financing excluded a public option sent health insurance stocks soaring Tuesday.


"Shares of U.S. health insurers rose broadly on Tuesday on hopes a health reform bill would not include a government-run option, which has drawn strong opposition from insurers who fear it would destroy the private marketplace.

The S&P Managed Health Care index of large U.S. health insurers closed 6.5 percent higher.

Aetna rose 12.6 percent, Coventry was up 12.7 percent and Cigna was 7.7 percent higher, all on the New York Stock Exchange. Centene rose 7.9 percent."


Health insurance executives who have poured money into the campaign coffers of Blue Dogs, Max Baucus, Chuck Grassley, Kent Conrad, Joe Lieberman and Susan Collins (as well as their political action committees) likely made all their money back in the one day rise in stock prices. The companies themselves, which hold huge amounts of their own stock, surely recouped all of their PAC investments on Tuesday alone.

You don't have to wonder whether Wall Street thinks Max Baucus' deal is great news for the health insurance industry's status quo: numbers like these don't lie.

http://campaignsilo.firedoglake.com/2009/07/28/health-insurance-stocks-soar-on-baucus-deal-news/

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9. Leave The Insurance Companies Alone!!!

Leave The Insurance Companies Alone!!!

:cry:


Executive Salaries of Insurance Companies

Jul 27, 2009

H. Edward Hanway, Chair/CEO, Cigna Corp., $30.16 million

Ronald A. Williams, Chair/CEO, Aetna Inc., $23,045,834 (2007)

David B. Snow, Jr, Chair/CEO, Medco Health, $21.76 million

Dale B. Wolf, CEO, Coventry Health Care, $20.86 million

Michael B. MCallister, CEO, Humana Inc., $20.06 million

Jay M. Gellert, President/CEO, Health Net, $16.65 million

Stephen J. Hemsley, CEO, UnitedHealth Group, $13,164,529 (2007)

Raymond McCaskey, CEO, Health Care Service Corp., (Blue Cross Blue Shield), $10.3 million (in 2007; up 78% from 2006)

Angela F. Braly, President/CEO, Wellpoint, $9,094,771

Michael F. Neidorff, CEO, Centene Corp., $8,750,751 (2007)

Todd S. Farha, CEO, WellCare Health Plans, $5,270,825 (2006)

Cleve Killingsworth, Pres/CEO, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts, $3.6 million (2007)

William C. Van Faasen, Chairman, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts, $3 million plus $16.4 million in retirement benefits

Daniel Loepp, CEO, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan, $1,657,555 (2006)

Charlie Baker, President/CEO, Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, $1.5 million (2006)

James Roosevelt, Jr., CEO, Tufts Associated Health Plans, $1.3 million (2006)

Daniel P. McCartney, CEO, Healthcare Services Group, Inc., $ 1,061,513 (2007)

http://www.prosperityagenda.us/node/1041

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11. Lennon: There are no problems only solutions

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12. Why Health Cares For Profits Not

Why Health Cares For Profits Not
Jul 29, 2009

As Paul Krugman puts it in his blog (July 25, 2009, "Why markets can’t cure healthcare.") "There are no examples of successful health care based on the principles of the free market, for one simple reason: in health care, the free market just doesn’t work. And people who say that the market is the answer are flying in the face of both theory and overwhelming evidence."

The reason is simple: for health care you need insurance (because costs are enormous for only a haphazard few). But, if insurance and "care" are private, the sick represents a "loss" so private insurance and "care" will "basically spend a lot of money on socially destructive activities" (Krugman). This is nevertheless the conceptual foundation of for-profits health insurance and Health Maintenance Organizations. As the Nixon tapes demonstrate, the day before Nixon created the contemporary health care system in the USA, with presidential fiat, and tax dollars, Nixon confessed the system would rest on gouging the Public.

It should become an axiom of house management that profits that are systematically not profitable to the overall society should be made unlawful.

That the core of civilization is psychologically motivated by higher ideals is in particular why the plutocrats do not completely run the Defense Department (they try to profit from it, but so do we all). Defense is mostly run by the government of the civilization itself, in a public manner. There are no DMOs (Defense Maintenance Organizations). Defense is not a question of free market and lowest bid ("My name is Buffet, "friend" of president, and I have a strategic nuclear submarine made in China to sell to you, capable of eradicating dozens of millions of people with its cheap Pakistani crew, please profit from this cheaper deal, free market does best.")

If the so called "Blue Dog democrats" want so badly that the USA go to the dogs, I recommend, indeed, the total free market approach for defense, as they already do for health. (Bush-Cheney tried this with Halliburton, Black Water, etc...) After all, waiting for all Americans to die of natural diseases from the breakdown of their health care system may take too long...

OK, let’s leave the dog house. That profits are not the best guide is why there should be no giant HMO system to the exclusive extent they are developed now. Health is too serious a subject to be left to profit alone. In a way, it’s similar to the bank profit scheme.

read entire article at:

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2009/7/29/759135/-Why-Health-Cares-For-Profits-Not-

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13. Health Care and the Profit Motive

Health Care and the Profit Motive

July 30, 2009

Over 70% of Americans, according to one poll, want what's called a "public option" included in the health care reform package now before the Congress. It's reasonable to assume that these Americans are fed up with the health care they are getting from the private option (when it is available at all), and they are willing to risk all the scary consequences of government bureaucracy that the Republicans warn about when deriding publicly-provided health care.

So what's not to like about private health care from companies like Cigna and Humana and Blue Cross Blue Shield, other than the fact that fewer and fewer Americans are eligible if they have even the possibility of a chronic illness, those who are left in the system are paying skyrocketing premiums and out-of-pocket costs (averaging now at least $6,000 a year per person), and these companies will use the flimsiest pretexts to avoid paying claims?

What's not to like is the profit motive of the American capitalist system, at least as practiced these past 25 years. There was a time when the private sector did a decent job of providing health care, but that was a time when profit expectations of health care providers were much lower. Since 1982 and the Ronald Reagan economic program, profit expectations of American corporations have skyrocketed, and right behind have been the costs of health care, the cost of housing, the cost of military programs, the cost of banking, and the cost of many other products and services.

The locus of this pressure for profits is to be found in the American board room, and in industry after industry you can find the following:

1) Boards of directors profess to be interested first and foremost in shareholder value, because consulting firms like McKinsey have sold them on the mantra that the most successful companies (in terms of stock price) are those where management has a "laser-like focus" on the shareholders. Except this is a gross overstatement - management is only really interested in the stock price, and not at all in the shareholders. This is made possible by the fact that individuals who own the stock do so through intermediaries like mutual funds and pension plans, who defer to management except in the most egregious cases of incompetence.

2) As a result of point 1) above, an elite management class has arisen in corporate America that acts not simply as managers, but as owners of the company. They reward themselves with lucrative stock options and other perquisites, the CEO as leader of the company is granted dictatorial power by a compliant board chosen by him, and they are free to spend millions on lobbyists who buy off the Congress so as to avoid any meaningful government oversight or control.

entire article:

http://agonist.org/numerian/20090729/health_care_and_the_profit_motive