America’s Five Largest Health Insurers and their Profits in $Millions

1	UnitedHealth Group				2,977.0
2	WellPoint				2,490.7
3	Aetna				1,384.1
4	Humana				647.2
5	Cigna				292.0

http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune500/2009/industries/223/index.html

Richard Nixon’s Health Care Plan – For EVERYONE

Upon adoption of appropriate Federal and State legislation, the Comprehensive Health Insurance Plan would offer to every American the same broad and balanced health protection through one of three major programs:

[1]–Employee Health Insurance, covering most Americans and offered at their place of employment, with the cost to be shared by the employer and employee on a basis which would prevent excessive burdens on either;

Every employer would be required to offer all full-time employees the Comprehensive Health Insurance Plan. Additional benefits could then be added by mutual agreement. The insurance plan would be jointly financed, with employers paying 65 percent of the premium for the first three years of the plan, and 75 percent thereafter. Employees would pay the balance of the premiums. Temporary Federal subsidies would be used to ease the initial burden on employers who face significant cost increases.

[2]–An improved Medicare Plan, covering those 65 and over and offered through a Medicare system that is modified to include additional, needed benefits.

[3]–Assisted Health Insurance, covering low-income persons, and persons who would be ineligible for the other two programs, with Federal and State government paying those costs beyond the means of the individual who is insured;

The program of Assisted Health Insurance is designed to cover everyone not offered coverage under Employee Health Insurance or Medicare, including the unemployed, the disabled, the self-employed, and those with low incomes. In addition, persons with higher incomes could also obtain Assisted Health Insurance if they cannot otherwise get coverage at reasonable rates. Included in this latter group might be persons whose health status or type of work puts them in high-risk insurance categories.

http://urlet.com/howard.design

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/aaron-e-carroll/its-amazing-whats-conside_b_350558.html

Democrats Kick Women to the Curb

NOW Opposes Health Care Bill That Strips Millions of Women of Abortion Access
Says Bill Obliterates Women’s Fundamental Right to Choose

Statement of NOW President Terry O’Neill

November 8, 2009

The House of Representatives has dealt the worst blow to women’s fundamental right to self-determination in order to buy a few votes for reform of the profit-driven health insurance industry. We must protect the rights we fought for in Roe v. Wade. We cannot and will not support a health care bill that strips millions of women of their existing access to abortion.

Birth control and abortion are integral aspects of women’s health care needs. Health care reform should not be a vehicle to obliterate a woman’s fundamental right to choose.

The Stupak Amendment goes far beyond the abusive Hyde Amendment, which has denied federal funding of abortion since 1976. The Stupak Amendment, if incorporated into the final version of health insurance reform legislation, will:

• Prevent women receiving tax subsidies from using their own money to purchase private insurance that covers abortion;
• Prevent women participating in the public health insurance exchange, administered by private insurance companies, from using 100 percent oftheir own money to purchase private insurance that covers abortion;
• Prevent low-income women from accessing abortion entirely, in many cases.

NOW calls on the Senate to pass a health care bill that respects women’s constitutionally protected right to abortion and calls on President Obama to refuse to sign any health care bill that restricts women’s access to affordable, quality reproductive health care.

###

For Immediate Release
Contact: Mai Shiozaki, 202-628-8669, ext. 116; cell 202-641-1906

http://www.now.org/press/11-09/11-08.html

Dennis Kucinich Explains Why He Voted NO

http://www.clevelandleader.com/node/11927

Rational Health Care After the Collapse

Link here:

http://urlet.com/popularity.buster

http://highboldtage.wordpress.com/2009/11/08/rational-health-care-after-the-collapse/

It pains me to be on the same side of an issue as some right wing Republicans but I am on the narrow issue of this bill. I am on the same side for different reasons. This bill will simply not solve the health care crisis that we face. At least Dennis Kucinich is on my side. Our nation (all of us together) spends at least $900 BILLION dollars a YEAR MORE THAN WE WOULD IF WE HAD A SINGLE PAYER SYSTEM. That is $3,000 per every man, woman, child and immigrant in our country. $3,000 of unnecessary expense compared to Canada, France or Portugal for example.

Obviously, to implement a single payer health system, some one is going to have to take a haircut. It is not just corporate fascists who run health insurance companies like mafia dons who will have to take a haircut, though they need one badly. The people who work for these useless health insurance company bureaucracies will have to find new employment as their employer will be out of business, just like buggy whip manufacturers in 1915.

Doctors will have to take a haircut. Doctors in single payer systems make half what doctors do in the US.

Redundant hospitals will have to be closed. The “free market” has produced a bubble in redundant hospital construction and redundant expensive diagnostic machinery.

Unions (especially entitled government employee unions) will have to give up their cadillac health insurance plans.

Community health clinics will have to close, under a single payer system there will be no need for them. All of the people who staff these bureaucracies will have to find productive work and will resist change.

The large and powerfully influential AARP will have to take a haircut, as sales of insurance is a major funding source for them.

 

The VA system will have to close. Under a single payer system that provides health care to everyone, there is no need for a VA health care system.

All of the above have constituencies in the millions that will fight tooth and nail against a single payer system. Some of the constituencies are Republican but lots of them are traditionally Democratic as well. So is it hopeless? In the short term yes. In the long term, a single payer system is inevitable because our current system is close to complete collapse.

Even profitable companies like United Health Care will run out of profitable customers as they whittle away at their own customer base. Government employee unions will face increased pressure against compensation and benefit packages that are simply out of reach of normal people – who are expected to pay for them with taxes. There are lots of doctors who refuse to accept any medicare patients, but there are fewer and fewer privately insured patients available for them to treat. Community health centers provide some kind of safety net for the poorest people, but for the working poor or retired people they provide nothing or worse than nothing – their sliding scales mean that treatment is often more expensive at a community clinic than it would be at a private doctor – that is if a private doctor was accessible.

After the collapse of privatized health care will come a rational single payer system.

have a peaceful day,

Bill

Text of the Health Reform Bill H.R. 3962 – Affordable Health Care for America Act

http://www.opencongress.org/bill/111-h3962/text

There is a place here to vote yes or no.  Currently 156 yes, 839 no, only 17 percent yes.  I voted no.  This is anunconscionable diversion and waste of public money.  Every “stakeholder” in the Democratic alliance is rewarded with pork, and lots of it.  No help for unemployed or people working for minimum wage, they will come in higher than any “sliding scale” will allow.

Yes I read it, skimmed a bit of it and read the meat.  It is 1900 pages but triple spaced, the last 3 or 400 pages are for the Indian Health Services, with special provisions for California , Nevada, Arizona, the Dakotas and Montana.  A sop for those powerful legislators.   I heartily think we should do more for our First Citizens, our Native People because we stole their land didn’t we?  This is not the way.  This whole bill is a grant farmer’s dream.

Why does this bill need to be so big?  It is big to hide the pork.  Everything in this bill could be considered in Congress one by one and each considered on its merits.

 

I am with Kucinich, we need a single payer system, not this piece of shit.