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Listen, people, it's time somebody punctured the suspension-of-reality bubble that Fox News and Dick Armey have encased you in.
We spend two point seven TRILLION dollars on health care PER YEAR in this country, and one way or another it COMES OUT OF YOUR PAYCHECK.
It's the raise you didn't get. Again. Tt's the sales taxes you pay, it's the property taxes you pay, it's that little extra you pay for your food and clothes and entertainment. IT'S ALREADY COMING OUT!
And it is coming out in the least-efficient and least-equitable way possible, a way that smacks the non-wealthy much harder than the people telling you to get out here and protest. You know, Dick Armey and United Health Care. Trust me, the CEO of any health insurance company can find the cash for their medical insurance in the cushions of one of their couches. The one in their ski chalet in Aspen, perhaps.
He's a concept for you: being free from government doesn't make you free... it just makes you free of government. Ronald Reagan didn't die from a gunshot wound. Does that mean he's still alive? NO! It just means he didn't die from a bullet! The fact that your wallet is NOT being assaulted by the government doesn't mean you're not paying the costs.
There was a woman recently discovered, in California, that had been locked in a shed for over a decade. Was she free?
According to Fox News, and I use the term "news" loosely, that woman was as free! Free as you or me, simply because it wasn't the GOVERNMENT locking her up in the shed. :woohoo:
Now, since nobody here buys that line of crap, try changing the characters in the story. The American people are having their financed assaulted, ravaged, destroyed. But it's not by the government so it must mean they're free, right?
Wrong!
Listen, people, if there was any room in the health insurance industry for competition and innovation, this wouldn't even be up for discussion. But there isn't. Health insurance at it's core is about getting a bill from a doctor and mailing them a check. They were doing this in ancient Sumer 4,500 years ago with clay tables and abacuses!
It's a mature process, virtually innovation-free. Like making paper clips or ball-point pens. Can you imagine if the Bic Corporation, the guys that make the white-bodied pens and the disposable lighters, kept making those exact same products year after year, yet every year raised prices by ten, twelve, fourteen percent? Imagine that! The price of a pack of ball-points doubling every six years. And the Bic executives got eight-figure salaries and seven-figure bonuses and mind-boggling amounts of company stock. Wouldn't that ring some alarm bells? And if Papermate was doing the exact same things, wouldn't THAT be an excuse for some kind of bell to ring in your brain?
If a ten-pack of ballpoints had cost a dollar in 1992, they would have cots two dollars in 1998, four dollars in 2004, and eight dollars in 2010? Can you imagine being FORCED to pony up eight bucks now for exactly the same thing that cost a buck the when Perot was running for office? Can you imagine in 2016 paying SIXTEEN dollars for a pack of ballpoints?
At what point would you say "Hey, we're being screwed! This isn't free-market capitalism, it monopoly capitalism!"
The health insurance companies are making things deliberately more complicated with a billion different risk pools and a deliberately inefficient bureaucracy because they can profitably charge you for the complexity! The only innovation LEFT in health insurance is thinking of new and exciting ways to TAKE IN MORE OF YOUR MONEY and PAY OUT LESS.
Now acne, pregnancy, domestic abuse, and caesarian section are all disqualifying pre-existing conditions that let them PAY OUT LESS. But only after you make a large claim, of course.
And then they accuse YOU of fraud. Oh, irony, thy name is UHC.
Well, the government can do what Big Insurance can't... put EVERY BORN AND NATURALIZED CITIZEN in the pool from CONCEPTION to DEATH. That simplicity alone would saved hundreds of billions annually. And when you take out the executive salaries and bonuses and Goldman Sachs-style golden parachutes, it's hundreds of billions more. PER YEAR. And the profits and lobbying? DOZENS OF BILLIONS a year.
Do you know how much the Secretary of Health and Human Services makes annually? $170,000 a year. If you offered that to the CEO of Aetna he's throw his latte at you before having his corporate security guards throw you out onto the street.
For god's sake, people, LOOK AT YOUR PAY STUBS. I pay 1.45% of my gross pay to Medicare and Medicaid... and over FOUR TIMES THAT AMOUNT in private insurance!
Nobody has ever, EVER been healed by a health insurance company. UHC didn't award a single MD last year. Not a single nurse got their bachelor's degree from Humana. Aetna didn't develop a single new pharmaceutical in 2009. And Blue Cross again failed to develop a single medical implant. Medica didn't discover a single new surgical procedure last year.
Those are areas where there is plenty of competition. Medical devices, pharmaceuticals, surgerical procedures, medical tools, diagnostic tools. And that is why the government is NOT trying to go into those areas.
But the boring, bureaucratic world of cutting checks to doctors? HELL YES!
And if you're going to shill for the insurance industry, you should at LEAST have enough self-respect to demand more than a free bus ticket and a square yard of posterboard.
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