As the country contemplates a major reform and restructuring of the way we run our national health care system (if it can even be called that), it needs to be pointed out that the mammoth health insurance industry is nothing but a parasite on that system.

Health insurance companies add zero value to the delivery of health care. Indeed, they are a significant cost factor that sucks up, according to some estimates such as one by the organization Physicians for a National Health Program, as much as 31 percent of every dollar spent on medical services (a percentage that has been rising steadily year after year).

Insurance companies are damaging in more ways than simply cost, though.

They also actively interfere in the delivery of quality medical care, as anyone who has had to battle with some "nurse" on the phone at an insurance company to get required pre-authorization for needed procedure can attest. Just recently, the editor of a local weekly alternative paper in Philadelphia, Brian Hinkey, the victim of a near fatal hit-and-run accident last year who spent several days in a coma, and has been working hard to regain the use of all his limbs and faculties, reported in an opinion piece in the Philadelphia Inquirer on how his insurer after a few successful weeks of in-hospital rehab, denied him coverage for six critical weeks for out-patient rehab services, though every specialist on head injuries knows that early, consistent therapy is crucial to recovery of lost brain function.

This kind of human abuse is standard operating procedure for companies whose bottom lines are fattened the more services they can deny to insured clients. My own father, once doomed by a metastasized cancer following prostate surgery, was saved by a procedure offered by a physician in Atlanta that his Blue Cross plan in Connecticut refused to pay for. He had to finance the expensive treatment himself.

Now these medical system parasites are suddenly running scared, because it is clear that if everyone in America is to be guaranteed health insurance coverage--a promised goal of the new administration of President Barack Obama, and, according to polls, the desire of a large majority of the American people--they are going to stand exposed as a costly impediment to achieving that goal.

Insurance companies have managed to stay profitable and at least somewhat affordable to the private employers and workers who, together, have to pay for them, by denying care not just to policy holders, who are denied certain tests and treatments but especially to those who have known ailments, who are simply denied coverage altogether.

For decades, people with "pre-existing conditions" have been either barred from coverage, or have had to sign waivers that excluded them from getting coverage for treatment of those pre-existing conditions. In the worst case, which is all too common, people have ended up dying because they couldn't get treatment for common and easily treated ailments like high blood pressure or diabetes.

Now we hear that two big insurance trade groups, the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association and America's Health Insurance Plans, have offered to "phase out the practice of varying premiums based on health status in the individual market" in the event that all Americans are required to obtain health insurance.

Well sure they're doing that. If they didn't, the government would force them to! The insurance industry, in saying that it would not price sick people out of coverage in a nationally-mandated health insurance scheme, is merely recognizing the political firestorm that would arise if it were not to do that, and were to force the sick and inform onto some government insurance plan, subsidized by taxpayers, while they just cherry-picked the healthy population, as they've been doing now for decades.

The whole point is that if everyone is included in the insurance pool, instead of only the healthy population, then the overall cost of being chronically or critically ill to the individual is spread over the whole of society. Premiums get adjusted accordingly.

Medicare is the model. Here we already have a government plan that covers every single elderly and disabled person.

If we were to simply extend Medicare to cover everyone in America, we would essentially have the Canadian model of health care (which, it should be pointed out, costs half what we pay in America for health care when private insurance and government programs are added together). As with current Medicare, the government would pay for treatment, with private doctors and hospitals providing the care, and with the government negotiating the permissible charges. That, in a nutshell, is what "single-payer" means--the government is the single payer for all health care. It doesn't mean, as the right-wing critics claim in their scaremongering propaganda, that people would be forced to use certain doctors and certain hospitals. Far from it. That's what private HMOs do.

Medicare is efficient (only 3.6% of Medicare's budget goes to administrative costs, compared to 31% for health care delivered through private insurance plans), its clients like it, and doctors and hospitals accept it.

We should not be tricked by this seeming sudden appearance of decency on the part of these corporate parasites. There is simply no valid reason for preserving the private insurance industry's role in any health care reform plan that is aimed at giving everyone access to health care in America. The Obama administration needs to jettison its "free market" fetish when it comes to health care. The financing of health care for all Americans can all be handled much better by the government. Medicare has proven this. Other countries--Britain, Australia, France, Canada, Taiwan and most other modern nations have proven this.

Leave the insurance industry to handle our car insurance and our life insurance. It has no more place in the delivery of health care than do tapeworms in the digestive process of our bowels.
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About author
Dave Lindorff is the author of Killing Time: an Investigation into the Death Row Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal. His new book of columns titled "This Can't be Happening!" is published by Common Courage Press. Lindorff's new book is "The Case for Impeachment," co-authored by Barbara Olshansky.

He can be reached at: dlindorff@yahoo.com

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/20965

Until we realize that "We already pay for the uninsured" health care will continue to cripple this country! Insurance companies already limit what they will pay for and how often they will pay it!!!! Isnt that the fear of a universal health care!!!!! Its already happening.

We could refuse to treat those who dont have the ability to pay. Let those people just suffer and die! Maybe send them all to a secluded island or something!!!!

the smirking chimp?

You have a better answer?

just commenting on the funny name is all

Did you realy expect the capitalsitic mainstream media to run this article? they would "offend" their advertisers.

You know I have never been to that site..What is a wigged out left wing site? The article kinda hits the nail square on the head!

Here! Here! Mr. Lindorff! Please follow the link below the tell our President!
http://www.whitehouse.gov/openforquestions/

Bewildering the Herd
Noam Chomsky interviewed by Rick Szykowny
The Humanist, November/December 1990 [September 7, 1990]
QUESTION: You take the average American who gets his or her information on the world at large from, say, the network news, from wire service reports in the daily newspaper, and maybe -- if he or she is feeling especially dutiful -- from CNN or "Nightline." How good a picture do they actually have of what's really happening in the world?
CHOMSKY: They get a good picture of how the state-corporate nexus in the United States would like to depict the things that are happening in the world ... and occasionally more than that.

QUESTION: Occasionally more than that?

CHOMSKY: Yeah. But not most of the time. Most of the time the press is very disciplined.

QUESTION: Well, in short, what I'm asking is how well served are Americans by the mainstream media?

CHOMSKY: If you follow the mainstream media with great care and skepticism and approach it with the right under standing of how propaganda works, then you can learn a lot. The normal viewer or reader gets fed a propaganda line.

QUESTION: You've frequently stated that the Western media constitute the most awesome propaganda system that has ever existed in world history. But at the same time, the press tries to cultivate a mythology or popular image of itself as tireless, fearless seekers after the truth. You have them taking on the politicians, such as Dan Rather challenging George Bush on the air, or even toppling them from office, as Woodward and Bernstein allegedly did with Nixon. That's the public image of the media, and I think many people are going to be surprised to hear that they are being fed a line of propaganda.

CHOMSKY: Well, I doubt that many people would. Most polls indicate that the majority of the population regards the media as too subservient to power. But it's quite true that for educated people it would come as a surprise. And that's because they are the ones most subject to propaganda. They also participate in the indoctrination, so therefore they're the most committed to the system. You mentioned that the media cultivate an image of a tribune of the people fighting power. Well, that's natural. How would a reasonable propaganda institution depict itself? But in order to determine the truth of the matter, you have to look at the particular cases. I think it is one of the best established conclusions in the social sciences that the media serve what we may call a propaganda function -- that is, that they shape perceptions, select the events, offer interpretations, and so on, in conformity with the needs of the power centers in society, which are basically the state and the corporate world.

QUESTION: So, in other words, an adversarial press doesn't really exist in this country.

CHOMSKY: It exists out on the margins, and occasionally you'll find something in the mainstream. I mean, for example, there are cases where the press has stood up against a segment of power. In fact, the one you mentioned -- Woodward and Bernstein helped topple a president -- is the example that the media and everyone else constantly uses to show that the press is adversarial.

But there are very serious problems with that case that have been pointed out over and over again. In fact, what the example actually shows is the subordination of the media to power. And you can see that very clearly as soon as you take a look at the Watergate affair. What was the charge against Richard Nixon, after all? The charge against Nixon was that he attacked people with power -- he sent a gang of petty criminals for some still unknown purpose to burglarize the Democratic party headquarters. Well, you know, the Democratic party represents essentially half of the corporate system. Its one of the two factions of the business party which runs the country. And that is real power. You don't attack real power, because people in power can defend themselves. We can easily demonstrate that that's exactly what was involved; in fact, history was kind enough to set up a controlled experiment for us. At the very moment of the Watergate exposures, there was also another set of exposures: namely, the FBI COINTELPRO operations which were exposed using the Freedom of Information Act right at the same time. Those were infinitely more serious than the Watergate caper. Those were actions not by a group of crooks mobilized by the president or a presidential committee but by the national political police. And it was not just Richard Nixon; it ran over a series of administrations. The exposures began with the Kennedy administration -- in fact earlier, but primarily with the Kennedy administration -- and ran right through the Nixon administration. What was exposed was extremely serious -- far worse than anything in Watergate. For example, it included political assassination, instigation of ghetto riots, a long series of burglaries and harassment against a legal political party -- namely, the Socialist Workers Party, which, unlike the Democratic party, is not powerful and did not have the capacity to defend itself. That aspect of COINTELPRO alone, which is just a tiny footnote to its operations, is far more important than Watergate.


read more at http://www.chomsky.info/interviews/19900907.htm

It's a necessary evil. It is a capitalist way of those that cannot pay for medical care in full to receive the care they need when they need it. And before you say nationalized, remember that Medicare fraud is rampant (A similar rate IIRC but I cannot find my source so do not quote me on that yet) and still is only on a localized segment of the population. Expanding the scope of a nationalized program will only exponentially increase the fraud rate.

get back to me when you find your data and let me know if it is even close to the fraud at Halliburton and KBR in Iraq.

so I assume we're back in second grade again? Do two wrongs make a right now? Quit comparing everything to what Bush did. You hold them so accountable but blow everything off against those who you support because it's "not as bad." And quote a real news source for once. You criticize Fox every chance you get.
You are the one doing the effortless cut and paste and then demand I bring my sources for something I admittedly cannot find. I heard that once, I never stated it as fact or said that was my belief (hence the 'don't quote me on that' remark). The fact is, Medicare does not know their exact cost of fraud.

However, there are those advantages Medicare enjoys in addition to expenses that cannot be charted to Medicare that are, in fact, Medicare administrative expenses.

The economics of scale. Medicare serves far fewer people than private insurance companies. Want to add another 10 million to the pot? Fine, now you need more managers, accountants, facilities, hardware, etc to accommodate the expansion. Overhead is not linear. If the program is expanded into what is proposed, I can flat out guarantee that the cost of the program will far exceed the costs of comparable private insurance.

How about the IRS agents that manage Medicare-related tax revenues and returns? They are the equivalent of an AR Accountant in a private firm, yet, they are not included in the actual Medicare costs. In fact, all the other resources of the Federal Government that Medicare uses are not included in their actual budget - only those that fall directly under the umbrella of the program.

What about fraud prevention? Private companies are businesses. As such, they incur higher costs to prevent fraudulent practices in order to remain profitable. Medicare has no such need. They are the government and will not go out of business if mass quantities of their funds are lost to fraud - they'll just get their next batch of cash next year.

And lastly, where are the statistics that show the actual costs of private insurance to be so high? Everything I saw pointed to that being the extreme high point with the average being around 9% once you took out the profits, commissions, and the like. That would put it below double what Medicare currently costs - at a much, much smaller scale.

I did that. I asked some questions.