Here is a very simple reality about health insurance that nobody is discussing.

[Jackpine Radical]

The fact is that they make a lot of their profits by reinvesting the money they take in as premiums in the market. That is, they are gambling with it, like everyone else on Wall Street. The market has gone to shit. They need more money to cover their bets. Now alluva sudden they gotta raise their rates 40% to keep the CEO's yacht in diesel fuel.

[leftstreet]

1. Every time a CEO's yacht runs out of fuel, God kills a kitten n/t

[Double T]

3. Will someone please sink the yacht before another poor kitten loses its life.

What did I do with those live torpedoes I was saving.

[mindwalker_i]

5. I did a google search on "God kills a kitten"...

And God's killing a awful lot of kittens. What an asshole...

[BeFree]

2. Its the system

This is news?

The capitalist system works this way in all ways. Especially the Insurance companies. They take your premium and invest in the markets, hoping to make a profit off your money. Retirement funds..ditto. Etc. etc.

Insurance, at its best is socialism, in our case run by capitalists.

[havocmom]

4. been shouting about insurance $$ going to Wall Street for YEARS

And this mandate shit is just an end run about John Q. Public's block of 'privatizing Social Security' which basically would give Wall Street gamblers money from payroll deductions. Since The Street didn't get that infusion of $$ the mandate would be a laundered version. Forced to pay insurance companies without any real competition, worker bee forced to pay into Wall Street. Wall Street won't mend its ways and needs more sucker dollars to hold up the ponzi party.

Mandate = forced payments to keep the crooked system afloat a bit longer, with the insurance company fat cats taking a cut for money laundering.

[EFerrari]

6. It's going to be a cold day in Crawford when these people get a dime from me.

They're vultures, with apologies to actual vultures.

[kudzu22]

7. True, but they're not allowed risky investments

State law dictates what investment portfolios an insurer may have. A lot of it ends up in government bonds. This is why insurance companies didn't go belly up like all the other financial firms. AIG is the exception because they were "insuring" the risky investments in the first place.

The premium increases are entirely due to the cost of medical care, not recovering investment losses.