Cap the profits of health care insurers.

Former CIGNA executive Wendell Potter reports that in the early 1990s health insurance companies devoted more than 95% of every premium dollar to paying doctors and hospitals to reimburse them for health care provided to insurers. Things have changed:

Today, insurers only pay about 81 cents of each premium dollar on actual medical care. The rest is consumed by rising profits, grotesque executive salaries, huge administrative expenses, the cost of weeding out people with pre-existing conditions and claims review designed to wear out patients with denials and disapprovals of the care they need the most.
They keep profits high by creatively denying claims, canceling individual policies when insureds get sick, kicking unprofitable insureds out of the insurance pool, and issuing confusing benefit statements to insureds. Potter, with the support of Senator Al Franken, makes the case that Congress should pass legislation requiring health insurers to pay at least 90% of the premiums for real health care. According to Potter, the difference between 81% and 95% is $112 billion a year, which would amount to a significant reduction in premiums or a significant improvement in coverage. Wendell Potter is a voice we can trust when it comes to health care reform. A few months ago, I posted regarding his lengthy interview with Bill Moyers. See, also, Potter's recent interview at MSNBC, indicating that the health care industry owns the U.S. Senate. Potter makes clear that there is no reform taking place with current "reform" legislation.

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Christopher Hitchens: Where is Bernard Law?

In this lecture, Christopher Hitchens asks about the whereabouts of Cardinal Bernard Law, who is guilty of crimes "too hideous to describe." The undeniable fact is that Law is currently a powerful member of the Catholic clergy in Rome--he is one of the people held in high enough esteem that he has the power and privilege of voting to choose Popes. Any organization whose leaders have basic moral decency would have put such a man into handcuffs and delivered him to the police. Hitchens has many more questions for the Catholic Church too, and not an unfair attack among them, in my opinion. Examples include forbidding condom usage in Africa, where AIDs is an epidemic. This is not an academic issue--it is killing thousands of people. I also know many thinking Catholics who are driven to distraction by the official church teachings in regard to gays and birth control. Here's what Hitchens has to say about the need for the Catholic Church to apologize: I do not post this video to condemn lay Catholics, many of whom are good-hearted people who do inspiring works of kindness in the name of the church. Instead, I've posted this video because I have become weary of seeing the Church automatically and publicly presented as a font of moral judgment just because it is a church (or, in some circles, The Church). I am wondering if we will ever see a day when the Catholic Church (and every other church) is not judged favorably merely because it is a church. I'm wondering whether we will ever see the day when, in response to a claim that we should follow rule because "It is a rule of a church," people will generally ask: "What kind of church?" or "What is the track record of that church?" In any regard, we should never assume that a church is wise or moral just because it is a church. The current job title of Bernard Law compels this. Bottom line: No more free passes for churches. Or for any entity or any person, for that matter.

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God Is God, Law Is Law, and Stupid is Stupid.

This shouldn't surprise anyone. The surprise is we haven't seen this "solution" proposed more often as overtly. Here is a lesson on how not to try to make intractable cultural traditions compatible with intractable reality under dubious moral imperatives. But what this really shows is the limit of patience. People hammer away at something that refuses to yield to the methods being employed and rather than change methods, eradicate the problem. This sort of things make it so easy to be a cynic.

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But wait, there’s more!

It's black Friday today, and I was somehow reminded of Ron Popeil, of Chop-o-Matic fame, inventor of many well-known household products. He has sold more than a billion dollars worth of rotisseries. I noticed that many of Popeil's infomercials are available on YouTube, including this one featuring his food dehydrator: Popeil, who was quite successful as an inventor, was equally impressive as a marketer. He explains his approach to inventing and marketing here. Tonight it occurred to me that even though I saw Popeil's commercials decades ago, I remembered much of Popeil's shtick. I especially remember the audiences applauding on cue. It was somehow effective even though I knew that these people had been paid to applaud on cue. What I didn't know was how the audience members were paid, and it was not with money, as you'll read here. As you can read in the same article, Popeil is now getting ready to market what he characterizes as his final invention, a deep fryer.

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Hunger and Hypocrisy

Peter Singer offered this challenge in the Oct/Nov issue of Free Inquiry (not available on-line):

Imagine that you are walking through a park past a shallow ornamental pond, and you notice that a child has fallen into that pond and seems to be in danger of drowning. You look around for the parents or the babysitter, but there is no one in sight. What should you do? Obviously, you should rush into the pond and save the life of the child. But wait a minute--you are wearing your most expensive shoes, and you don't have time to kick them off. They will be ruined if you go into the pond with them on. Do your shoes make a difference in your decision? Everyone agrees that they don't. You can't let a pair of shoes mean more than a child's life. So how about giving just the cost of an expensive pair of shoes to an organization that is saving lives in developing countries? I don't think it is any different than saving the child in the shallow pond. Yes, it is different psychologically but not morally. Distance doesn't make someone's life less valuable.
Singer's implicit assumption is that your dollars are fungible. When you spend a dollar on a luxury, it is dollar that you could have spent to save the life of a dying child. In other words, dollars don't come pre-categorized such that some dollars can only be spent on luxuries. You cannot escape this logic. Therefore, If Jesus (or whatever God you might believe in) were watching, you closely, and you knew it, you couldn't possibly pay $300 for a pair of shoes when perfectly adequate $100 shoes were also available and when you knew (as you always do know) that the other $200 could be used to save the lives of innocent children. I get frustrated with those who think that the commandment "Do not kill" is not being violated by those who spend excessive money on fancy clothes, cars or houses (or buy any luxury) in the same world where children are dying every day and those deaths are preventable. That said, I don't think that "Do not kill" is a workable rule. It rings nicely to simple ears because it is phrased uncategorically, but we really need a new rule that recognizes that we are not exactly a nation of murderers when we buy a steady stream of unnecessary luxuries (especially at Christmas time), but it's something like that when we completely unhinge our consciences from our wallets, which so many of us in sanctimonious American do almost every day. I don't really know how to articulate such a rule, but I do want to take this moment to recognize this undeniable fact as part of my "Life is Real" campaign: Every day, most of us in American choose to buy things with dollars that could be used for saving the lives of real children. That's the way things are down here on planet Earth, and going around claiming that "Do not kill" only means don't shoot or stab innocent people doesn't change things one bit.

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