Health Care Reform? What Health Care Reform?

[skyrick]

Jim Hightower's Facebook posting today.

GREEDHEAD TROPHY UP FOR GRABS
Today at 2:00am
America’s sports writers had all but ceded the coveted “Corporate Greedhead Trophy” to the Wall Street Barons this year but – Holy Cow – here come the Health Care Insurance Giants ! To paraphrase my old high school football coach, “when the going gets ugly, the ugly get going” – and our country’s five largest health insurance corporations are definitely making a run for the trophy. They recently stunned greed-watchers with an announcement that they had scored record profits in 2009, totaling $12.2 billion. Wow – that’s a 56 percent hike in profits over the previous year for United Health, Wellpoint, Aetna, Humana, and Cigna! Wait, that’s not all, The Insurance Giants also booted 2.7 million Americans out of their health plans last year, leaving these older and sicker customers in the corporate dust. Then, in a slick, hidden-ball play, three of the five Giants shifted more of their customers’ premiums out of providing medical care, instead siphoning more of that money into corporate profits, executive salaries, and administrative overhead. I’m telling you, these guys can play! Check out the spectacular “Hail Mary” pass heaved by Anthem Blue Cross, a California subsidiary of Wellpoint. Even though Wellpoint is rolling in a 91 percent increase in profits, its Anthem unit suddenly streaked toward the goal line, shocking its unsuspecting customers with a demand for a 39 percent increase in their premiums this year. This rate hike is 10 times more than the rise in the actual cost of health care. What a move! Still, it won’t be easy for the upstart Insurance Giants to out-ugly the more sophisticated Wall Street Barons. But the great thing about the corporate league is that competition to be the number one national greedhead is always fierce – and insurance is definitely in the running.

[mugofbeer]

While overall I can't see their rate hike increase was justified, lets be fair. Wellpoint posted fourth quarter 2009 net income of $5.95 per share, including net benefits of $4.79per share resulting primarily from a gain on the sale of their NextRx subsidiaries. Fourth quarter 2009 adjusted net income was $1.16 per share. Compare their profits to last year (excluding this asset sale) and profits would have been up only about 6%. Their net revenues were down, their payouts increased significantly and, prior to the rate hike announcement, medical costs increased significantly, their customer base declined and they had gotten some pretty bearish analyst recommendations.

Looking at a company that has $21 billion in cash (and keep in mind, insurance companies need a huge amount of cash on hand to pay claims), the 39% rate hike request seems quite excessive. Their premise of less customers doesn't hold water since that also means less claims.

The calls for investigation into the rate hike increases by Wellpoint and their California Anthem subsidiary should take place. I would be interested in knowing whether there is politics behind it or not. Looking at their fundamentals, 39% is outrageous.

[oneforone]

The best way to control insurance rates is to move the coverage from corporate america to the induvidual.

If companies had to compete for customers like Best Buy and Target do, the price of insurance would drop drastically. Not to mention, induviduals would have an incentive to be healthy. The better you take care of yourself, the cheaper your rates.

[PennyQuilts]

The best way to control insurance rates is to move the coverage from corporate america to the induvidual.

If companies had to compete for customers like Best Buy and Target do, the price of insurance would drop drastically. Not to mention, induviduals would have an incentive to be healthy. The better you take care of yourself, the cheaper your rates.

When you have a stake in something, it is amazing the difference it makes in how you spend your money. Of course, then you get back to the ones who won't pay five cents for insurance because they want a boat, instead, so the rest of us end up subsidizing their hobby when they break their arm. There aren't easy answers but I personally would rather have a fund to help the ones who truly can't afford care, and make them eligible by a rational set of criteria that is verified - and let the rest of us be grownups or bankrupt. Of course, I don't think that would work, either. Some people are just flat irresponsible and/or play the system because they can. And no one likes to keep them honest. So you get back to people wanting something for nothing and plenty of other people who have no problem with that, particularly if they aren't the ones paying for it.

Forcing people to get private insurance strikes me as unconstitutional.

[USG '60]

[QUOTE=oneforone;302706]The best way to control insurance rates is to move the coverage from corporate america to the induvidual.

QUOTE]

And a big AMEN

[BrettL]

All I know is when it costs 30K a week for my baby to be in the NICU, JUST for room and board... something is wrong.

[Bunty]

My guess the high charge comes from paying for other babies who had parents who had to declare bankruptcy. If we believe the government should not be going any further in paying for the health care of others, then medical bankruptcy should be here to stay.

[PennyQuilts]

The reason the costs are so high is because so much of our health care IS free, depending on your age and/or income. Making it all free isn't going to make it any less expensive. The costs will remain. It simply shifts the costs to the better heeled public as a whole - with little incentive for the ones not paying into the system to try to keep costs down. And mind you, the current medicare system doesn't say the wealthy don't get the benefits. They just have to be old enough. So the elderly, even if well off, are also getting "free" health care that the younger workers get to pay for. This was our government's bright idea that was sold to the public by painting a picture of how all the old grannies would end up in the in street if we didn't pay for this. Well, well. Have you seen how many of those old grannies are driving caddies? Doesn't matter. They are covered and parents with children in NICU help pay for it. I am not saying granny should be on the street but tell me - what is wrong with this picture? One size does not fit all. And they will make the same stupid arguments on this health care bill. Pay or people will die!

As long as you can afford to pay and aren't retirement age, they will seek the money. The more money you have, the more people seem to think you owe those who either can't pay or won't be responsible about paying. There is no free health care tree.

[Jethrol]

All I know is when it costs 30K a week for my baby to be in the NICU, JUST for room and board... something is wrong.

Exactly.

Something is definitely wrong and I don't know too many people that will disagree. However how we solve that particular problem and all the other problems with our current health care system is certainly up for debate. Unfortunately people don't seem to want to engage in debate at all and simply want to shout down anyone that doesn't agree with them.

[Jethrol]

My guess the high charge comes from paying for other babies who had parents who had to declare bankruptcy.

I would say that's a contributing factor, other factors include the high cost of medical malpractice insurance, suppliers overcharging hospitals, universities and the skyrocketing costs of tuition, very few regulations to help control any of these costs so they just keep going up without anything being in place to stop and/or mitigate their growth, and on and on and on.

IMO the problem is too complex to simply point a finger and just say, "That....see that right there....that is THE reason for our health care crisis." It's just too complex.

If we believe the government should not be going any further in paying for the health care of others, then medical bankruptcy should be here to stay.

Quite true....it's really the only relief that some people have. What's really scary is if you've filed bankruptcy because of huge medical bills but you're still sick and/or relapse.

[mugofbeer]

There is no doubt the system is broken but I 100% disagree with the President who said this can't be done gradually. It has to be done in a big way. Doing something this massive in a "big way" invites corrupt actions by politicians who simply want to nationalize the system. Doing it gradually allows clarity, allows understanding and allows inefficiencies to be discovered and corrected - all things the left doesn't want the populous to see.

[BrettL]

The reason the costs are so high is because so much of our health care IS free, depending on your age and/or income. Making it all free isn't going to make it any less expensive.

Why are you saying this? Of course its not going to be free, and even the presidents plan (which I don't agree with ) doesn't make it free.

[mugofbeer]

The best way to control insurance rates is to move the coverage from corporate america to the induvidual.

If companies had to compete for customers like Best Buy and Target do, the price of insurance would drop drastically. Not to mention, induviduals would have an incentive to be healthy. The better you take care of yourself, the cheaper your rates.

OK. Some food for thought. First, you don't WANT insurance premiums too low because then the insurance companies will not be able to afford to pay the claims they get and the basic principle of insurance will be violated. With some types of insurance, the states have actually stepped in and had the insurance companies roll back rate decreases because they weren't maintaining sufficient capital reserves.

The second bite of food-for-thought is this....everyone is looking at the insurance companies as the villains. Insurance companies take in premiums and pay out claims. The claims, in the case of health care, are sent to them by doctors and hospitals. The rates of profit for most health insurance providers are fairly slim. So, the more I look at this, the more I think attention should be paid to the medical providers who send the outrageous bills to the insurance companies.

Why DOES the IC for the infant cost $30,000 a day? Why does the aspirin tablet cost $50? Etc, etc. One reason are malpractice suits. Doctors and hospitals require unnecessary tests and procedures for the sole sake of covering their butts. Secondly, as has already been said above, a whole lot of folks get their medical care for free for many reasons - but the bottom line is the rest of us pay for it through astronomical bills.

Whats the answer? A big huge government run behemouth that no one knows whether or not it will work or if it will totally bankrupt our economy? The president insists this has to be done all at once yet he has not provided any reasoning I have seen as to why a slower piecemean process wouldnt work. Its starting to look like maybe he just wants to accomplish something and this is what he is staking his reputation on.

[PennyQuilts]

Why are you saying this? Of course its not going to be free, and even the presidents plan (which I don't agree with ) doesn't make it free.

My post was about medical care costs, specifically in this case, the costs to care for that little baby.

[stick47]

Published: March 5, 2010
Updated: 1:30 p.m.
Mark Steyn: Obamacare worth the price to Democrats
By MARK STEYN
Syndicated columnist

So there was President Obama, giving his bazillionth speech on health care, droning yet again that "now is the hour when we must seize the moment," the same moment he's been seizing every day of the week for the past year, only this time his genius photo-op guys thought it would look good to have him surrounded by men in white coats.
Why is he doing this? Why let "health" "care" "reform" stagger on like the rotting husk in a low-grade creature feature who refuses to stay dead no matter how many stakes you pound through his chest?
Because it's worth it. Big time. I've been saying in this space for two years that the governmentalization of health care is the fastest way to a permanent left-of-center political culture. It redefines the relationship between the citizen and the state in fundamental ways that make limited government all but impossible. In most of the rest of the Western world, there are still nominally "conservative" parties, and they even win elections occasionally, but not to any great effect (Let's not forget that Jacques Chirac was, in French terms, a "conservative").
The result is a kind of two-party one-party state: Right-of-center parties will once in a while be in office, but never in power, merely presiding over vast left-wing bureaucracies that cruise on regardless.
Republicans seem to have difficulty grasping this basic dynamic. Less than three months ago, they were stunned at the way the Democrats managed to get 60 senators to vote for the health bill. Then Scott Brown took them back down to 59, and Republicans were again stunned to find the Dems talking about ramming this thing into law through the parliamentary device of "reconciliation." And, when polls showed an ever larger number of Americans ever more opposed to Obamacare (by margins approaching three-to-one), Republicans were further stunned to discover that, in order to advance "reconciliation," Democrat reconsiglieres had apparently been offering (illegally) various cosy Big Government sinecures to swing-state congressmen in order to induce them to climb into the cockpit for the kamikaze raid to push the bill through. The Democrats understand that politics is not just about Tuesday evenings every other November, but about everything else, too.
A year or two back, when the Canadian Islamic Congress attempted to criminalize my writing north of the border by taking me to the Canadian "Human Rights" Commission, a number of outraged American readers wrote to me, saying, "You need to start kicking up a fuss about this, Steyn, and then maybe Canadians will get mad and elect a conservative government that will end this nonsense."
Makes perfect sense. Except that Canada already has a Conservative government under a Conservative prime minister, and the very head of the "human rights" commission investigating
me was herself the Conservative appointee of a Conservative minister of justice. Makes no difference.
Once the state swells to a certain size, the people available to fill the ever-expanding number of government jobs will be statists – sometimes hard-core Marxist statists, sometimes social-engineering multiculti statists, sometimes fluffily "compassionate" statists, but always statists. The short history of the post-war welfare state is that you don't need a president-for-life if you've got a bureaucracy-for-life: The people can elect "conservatives," as the Germans have done and the British are about to do, and the Left is mostly relaxed about it because, in all but exceptional cases (Thatcher), they fulfill the same function in the system as the first-year boys at wintry English boarding schools who, for tuppence-ha'penny or some such, would agree to go and warm the seat in the unheated lavatories until the prefects strolled in and took their rightful place.
Republicans are good at keeping the seat warm. A bigtime GOP consultant was on TV, crowing that Republicans wanted the Dems to pass Obamacare because it's so unpopular it will guarantee a GOP sweep in November.
OK, then what? You'll roll it back – like you've rolled back all those other unsustainable entitlements premised on cobwebbed actuarial tables from 80 years ago? Like you've undone the federal Department of Education and of Energy and all the other nickel'n'dime novelties of even a universally reviled one-term loser like Jimmy Carter? Andrew McCarthy concluded a shrewd analysis of the political realities thus:
"Health care is a loser for the Left only if the Right has the steel to undo it. The Left is banking on an absence of steel. Why is that a bad bet?"
Indeed. Look at it from the Dems' point of view. You pass Obamacare. You lose the 2010 election, which gives the GOP co-ownership of an awkward couple of years. And you come back in 2012 to find your health care apparatus is still in place, a fetid behemoth of toxic pustules oozing all over the basement, and, simply through the natural processes of government, already bigger and more expensive and more bureaucratic than it was when you passed it two years earlier. That's a huge prize, and well worth a midterm timeout.
I've been bandying comparisons with Britain and France, but that hardly begins to convey the scale of it. Obamacare represents the government annexation of "one-sixth of the U.S. economy" – i.e., the equivalent of the entire British or French economy, or the entire Indian economy twice over. Nobody has ever attempted this level of centralized planning for an advanced society of 300 million people. Even the control-freaks of the European Union have never tried to impose a unitary "comprehensive" health care system from Galway to Greece. The Soviet Union did, of course, and we know how that worked out.
This "reform" is not about health care, and certainly not about "controlling costs." As with Medicare, it "controls" costs by declining to acknowledge them, or pay them. Dr. William Schreiber of North Syracuse, N.Y., told CNN that he sees 120 patients per week – about 30 percent on Medicare, 65 private on private insurance plans whose payments take into account the Medicare reimbursement rates, and about 5 percent who do it the old-fashioned way and write a check. He calculates that, under Obamacare, for every $5 he now makes, he'll get $2 in the future. Which suggests now would be a good time to retrain as a realtor or accountant, or the night clerk at the convenience store. Yet Congresswoman Louise Slaughter, D-N.Y., justifies her support for Obamacare this way:
"I even had one constituent – you will not believe this, and I know you won't, but it's true – her sister died. This poor woman had no dentures. She wore her dead sister's teeth."
Is the problem of second-hand teeth a particular problem in this corner of New York? I haven't noticed an epidemic of ill-fitting dentures on recent visits to the Empire State. George Washington had wooden teeth, but, presumably, these days the Sierra Club would object to the clear-cutting. Yet, even granting Congresswoman Slaughter the benefit of the doubt, is annexing the equivalent of a G7 economy the solution to what would seem to be the statistically unrepresentative problem of her constituent's ill-fitting choppers? Is it worth reducing the next generation of Americans to indentured servitude to pay for this poor New Yorker's dentured servitude?
Yes. Because government health care is not about health care, it's about government. Once you look at it that way, what the Dems are doing makes perfect sense. For them

[mugofbeer]

There's a whole lotta truth to this article.

[skyrick]

And still, except for Mug of Beer in the first response to this thread, no one is discussing the huge premium increases, after record profits, that was the gist of the article in my original post.

Thank you M.o.B.

[mugofbeer]

But there WEREN'T record profits...that was my point. The example I gave was that the large profit was mainly due to the sale of one of their units.

[BrettL]

My post was about medical care costs, specifically in this case, the costs to care for that little baby.

Ok, I must have missed something.

What medical care costs will become free when this bill is passed?

[skyrick]

But there WEREN'T record profits...that was my point. The example I gave was that the large profit was mainly due to the sale of one of their units.

That was one company, Wellpoint. Even you said that a 39% increase in premiums was "outrageous".