The REAL Reason Health Insurers Stock is SKYROCKETING

[Vinnie From Indy]

The reason the health insurance industry stocks are skyrocketing is because those on Wall Street and in these corporate boardrooms know that there is not a SINGLE thing in this legislation that will prevent them from continuing to game the system. Not a single provision is a burden to them in any way. These companies have dozens and dozens of strategies and tactics to avoid the spirit of this legislation. Pre-existing condition? Sure, we'll cover you when your check clears. Good luck getting treated sucker!

What this legislation has done is buy these companies at least an additional decade of time to lie, cheat and steal as much as they possibly can.

I have absolutely no doubt that just a few years in the future there will still be tens of thousands of Americans dying from lack of TREATMENT. They'll have the papers stating they have health insurance, but they'll still be dying from lack of care.

[tridim]

1. That's true only if you ignore the actual provisions in the bill.

Lying about it doesn't help your cause.

[Vinnie From Indy]

5. I guess time will tell

Your faith in the integrity and honesty of Wellpoint et al is duly noted.

[grahamhgreen]

6. Name one provision that can not be gamed.

[tridim]

12. Any law or provision can be broken by anyone at any time..

That's not anything new.

Thankfully this bill punishes insurance companies who don't play ball by making their product affordable.

[grahamhgreen]

15. Can anyone go to jail? Can the company be dis-incorporated? What is the max penalty for the multi-

billion dollar corporation?

[Goldstein1984]

2. I fear that what you write is true.

But I hope that it is not.

[grahamhgreen]

3. Agreed. This is a no brainer. Ant 2,000 page bill can be gamed to mean anything.

[leftstreet]

4. We should have just bailed them out in advance and gone with Single Payer

K&R

[kirby]

7. Proponents...

of this bill are saying that if it passes, then in a few years it will be easier to change the laws to address the dying people. I am sympathetic to their argument.

[Vinnie From Indy]

8. Let's hope and work to make that happen!

One hopes, and it is likely, that future Congresses will address the fact that these health insurers aren't playing fair.

[truedelphi]

9. [problem being that this legislation gives the Big Insurers the premiums from

Thirty million new people.

And that will mean an awful lot MORE LOBBYISTS TO see that no real changes ever take place.

Also, you can refer to how Obama said last october (ie 2008) that if the Big Bank Bailouts were not what they should be, he and his Administration would see to it that things that needed to ber re-written would be re-written.

All that has happened in the mean time is that several times, Obama has URGED the banks to be nice to us consumers.

I don't think that the Health Care Lobbyists will let Obama do anything that the Big Bank Lobbyists have not let him do. To me, he appears to be one Sold out, Corporate-Sponsored Politician.

[Hannah Bell]

13. why would it be?

[kenny blankenship]

16. Yes it will be easier to raise premiums and deductibles

To be against doing so will be tantamount to attacking the health of all insured Americans. All Americans will depend on "our system", which by law is the insurance mafia; and if the insurance rackets are ailing for any reason, like mismanagement, bad investments, etc., it will NECESSARY to make the insurance co.s healthy again, by the intervention of govt. regulators or by tweaking the law in Congress "in order to safeguard the health and lives of our citizens!"

All you have to do is look at the debate currently playing out at DU: those who are against giving the public health of the nation away to crooked insurance racketeers are accused of no less than wanting to murder 30 million Americans. As it goes now, so shall it be in the future. Whenever the beast demands more blood, anyone speaking out against cooperating with it will be denounced for endangering the health and lives of everyone.

[Cessna Invesco Palin]

10. Judging the merits of this bill based on what the stock market is doing with those companies...

...is foolish in the extreme. If the stock market were a true judge of long-term profitability we'd all be buying our health insurance from pets.com.

[dmallind]

11. Are they up more than the market indices as a whole?

Perhaps stocks of companies that wirte software are going up because the corporatist DINO lapdogs in office are giving away trillions to the IT industry? Or maybe it's just an up day....

[kenny blankenship]

14. The only health this bill guarantees is the healthy profits of the Insurance rackets

From now on, when insurers are sucking wind because of the inefficient mismanagement this bill incentivizes, politicians will speak of the need to allocate more money to insurance co.s through higher premiums and deductibles to "ensure the health of all Americans."

The economic health of the insurance mafia will be spoken of as though it were the literal physical health of the citizenry. Why? Because you will have deeded over PUBLIC HEALTH to private, for-profit enterprise. "We have to defend the viability of our system - the lives of 300 million people depend on it!" Can't have healthy citizens if the insurance companies are ailing. Now you've put taxpayers on the hook for insurance company profitability forever, no matter how those companies mismanage. Fucking idiots.

[CrispyQ]

17. Agreed & nicely stated.

Our health care system is failing now, largely due to the for-profit insurance companies. Further entrenching these blood sucking behemoths into the system is a huge mistake.

[anarch]

18. I, like many people, have insurance but have historically avoided seeking health care

for the most part, b/c I still cannot afford it. That all changed when I was hospitalized a while back for a couple days, and all everyone could say was "well it's a good thing you have insurance!", which is true I suppose, in that I'm not as much in debt as I could have been.

I'd say, considering all my payments to the insurance company over the years, they've still made money off of me, despite having to pay the portion of the outrageous hospital bill that they covered.

With a great many more "mandatory" customers, many of whom I'm guessing will not really be able to pay for health services either, even with insurance, but part of whose paychecks will now be going to insurance companies, and with subsidies to cover the lower-income folks also going pretty much straight to the insurance companies...well, frankly I don't see how this is anything but a boon to the insurance industry. I hold out hope that it might also, inadvertently, help some more people get healthcare--but not in any really meaningful way, in my opinion. Only single payer, universal care can do that (again, in my opinion).

My point is, even with required high medical loss rates and several other components in this bill that seem like good things, it seems pretty much set to funnel more money to the insurance industry. I can't imagine their stock would do anything but increase in value.