This is not real health care reform

Howard Dean on what pretends to be "health care reform":

Real reform would significantly lower costs, improve the delivery of health care and give all Americans a meaningful choice of coverage. The current Senate bill accomplishes none of these. Real health-care reform is supposed to eliminate discrimination based on preexisting conditions. But the legislation allows insurance companies to charge older Americans up to three times as much as younger Americans, pricing them out of coverage. The bill was supposed to give Americans choices about what kind of system they wanted to enroll in. Instead, it fines Americans if they do not sign up with an insurance company, which may take up to 30 percent of your premium dollars and spend it on CEO salaries -- in the range of $20 million a year -- and on return on equity for the company's shareholders. Few Americans will see any benefit until 2014, by which time premiums are likely to have doubled. In short, the winners in this bill are insurance companies; the American taxpayer is about to be fleeced with a bailout in a situation that dwarfs even what happened at AIG.
I entirely agree with Dean. I would like to tear up the current proposals and start over. I'd do it in two steps. First, quickly pass a bill with all of the low-hanging fruit, to get them out of the way: for example, requiring portability and prohibiting rejection of new customers based on pre-existing conditions. Only then, proceed with the brunt of the program. Let the expensive part of the program live or die on its own merits. Undistracted by the low-hanging fruit, we can better evaluate how much the new program would cost and what the tax-payers would get for their money.

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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.

Continue ReadingBut wait, there’s more!