Insurance Companies Remind Us Why We Hate Them

[debbierlus]

Can we just do Single Payer and let them all die or do we have to wait for tens of thousands more people to die for the profiteering leeches?

Fuck nice.

http://www.ourfuture.org/blog-entry/2009104213/insurance-companies-remind-public-why-we-hate-them

Just as the Senate Finance Committee is about to pass a health care bill without a public option, the insurance lobby's last-minute hissy fit exposed the weakness of its argument against a public option.

America’s Health Insurance Plans, the main insurance lobby organization, released a report projecting a rise in annual premiums for the average family from $12,300 today to $25,900 in 2019 if the Senate Finance Committee version becomes law.

That version has an individual mandate to buy private health insurance -- albeit with lighter penalties than initially proposed, the report's complaint -- but it does not have a public option that competes with private health insurance.

The insurance industry is acting as if these price spikes would just magically happen after the bill becomes law, not acknowledge that it sets the costs of premiums.

Notably, one word is missing from the report: profit.

The whole point of a public option is its ability to set a lower cost of premiums, and force private insurers to reduce costs in areas such as fat executive salaries in order to remain competitive.

Yet the insurance lobby decided to remind the public, at a critical point in the health care debate, that it's been gouging them for years, and plans to gouge them some more.

Premiums have already risen 131% over the last ten years, and now they are promising another 111% increase.

The methodology arguing private insurers will have no choice but to raise prices is flawed. But it is a stark reminder that private insurers will be able to do what they want, and raise prices on the flimsiest of predicates.

If there is no strong public option, in the end, private insurers will be able to do what they want, and you won't have a choice.

So thank you insurance lobby, for letting the public know what the status quo will be like without giving people the choice of a public plan.

[janedum]

1. Health Insurance is a rip-off. Screw them!

[tigereye]

2. they have become as bad as any other insurance agency

gambling on people's lives. It's unconscionable and shouldn't be allowed.

That's the problem: health "insurance" vs. health care.

[debbierlus]

3. We need to destroy them.

[Captain Hilts]

4. Took advantage of Dems' 'nice guy' instincts. nt

[Rosa Luxemburg]

5. thousands of health insurance company workers can be absorbed

they will be needed to help run the single payer system. The former CEOS of the healthh insurance companies might be able help out too at a much lower salary.

[izquierdista]

6. Like all growths, it should be excised

That increase, from $12,300 to $25,900 represents an increase from about a quarter of median household income (~$45,000) to over half. The only things that grow that fast are tumors, and not benign ones. It's time that America had a radical insurancectomy and cut it out of the body politic.

And while I'm giving my opinion, I'd like to give "Fuck you!" to the Senate Finance committee. I'll move to Europe before I'm forced to buy private health "insurance" where the benefits disappear when you go to collect.

[debbierlus]

8. They run the whole scam like the mob

[eridani]

7. Killing and bankrupting people for profit

Their Enron business model needs to be dumped, now.