BENEFICIARIES OF PRIVATE HEALTH CARE (Part II)

"TAX THE VERY WEALTHY TO MAKE EVERYONE HEALTHY!"
- VIGILANTE, SOZADEE, CA -






TOP, L TO R: Allen Wise; Ronald A. Williams
BOTTOM: Karen Ignagni; Michael McCalister


This is my second consecutive inlstallment on the true beneficiaries of private health care. They are the persons shown here, NOT YOU. If you're insured, they benefit with immense salaries YOU pay for through your premiums. They are the ones who directly or indirectly cause you to pay ever-higher premiums, deductibles, and co-pays. They are the ones who directly or indirectly have your coverage stop if it gets too expensive for their liking. They are the ones who directly or indirectly decide how long your hospital stay will be, and whether or not you will get the type of treatment, or the dosage of medication your doctor prescribes for you. They. too, are the ones who are attempting to prevent the passage of a universal or public option health care reform bill in Congress. If you're NOT insured, remember that they are the ones who have, directly or indirectly, excluded you or have made premiums so ungodly high you can no longer afford their "coverage". THEY ARE ENEMIES OF THE PEOPLE. These are the Chief Executive Officers of some of America's largest health insurance companies. Three are an unholy trinity of profiteers who view their first priority as maximizing and increasing already gigantically huge profits for their companies, and their second priority as providing necessary health care for you. An additional CEO here is an aider, abettor, and parasite of these companies: she is the CEO of a very powerful Washington, D.C. firm raking in the cash lobbying for the big insurance companies against health care reform, especially against a public option. I will introduce this batch of profiteers to you now, and, as I did in part I of this installment, will provide details on their own exorbitant personal incomes, which you, the insured, are paying for. I hope you will remember these people next time you make an insurance premium payment, see a doctor, or go to the hospital. THEY ARE YOUR ENEMIES!


KAREN IGNAGNI
CEO, America's Health Insurance Plans (a lobbying firm).
Annual salary: figures unavailable for current salary or profits, but her 2005 salary was $ 1,236,422 according to CNNMoney, of February 15, 2006. You can bet your grundies that her salary has risen tremendously as the demand for her "services" has exponentially increased with the advent of Obama's push for health care reform, and she is one of the key health care lobbyists!
She opposes a windfall profits tax on health care insurers (naturally)!
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Some of her revealing quotes:
"It [an across the board cut in health care spending] doesn't have to happen right away, but having a commission, having a mechanism would give every stockholder group an incentive to create more productivity, to reduce unit costs and to create more efficiency."
(AHHH - SO STOCKHOLDERS AND CORPORATIONS ARE THE MAIN CONCERN HERE? WHAT ABOUT THE MILLIONS OF UNINSURED AND UNDERINSURED? AREN'T THEY IMPORTANT TOO? WHERE IS THEIR INSURANCE COVERAGE UNDER THIS DELAY YOU ARE RECOMMENDING, KAREN? SOUNDS LIKE THE OLD BUSHONOMICS ARGUMENT OF "LEAVE THE MARKET ALONE AND IT WILL POLICE AND FIX ITSELF." WE ALL KNOW WHAT A CROCK OF BULL THAT WAS)!
"It is hard to envision any kind of publicly sponsored option...that wouldn't rely on administered pricing...we are kidding ourselves if we think underpaying providers means cost-containment."
(WHAT DO YOU THINK YOUR PRECIOUS HEALTH INSURANCE HOSTS ARE DOING RIGHT NOW WHEN THEY DICTATE TO DOCTORS AND HOSPITALS WHAT THEY WILL PAY, KAREN)?
"It would be irresponsible to [have the insurance industry cut premiums by a set amount] unless we knew that cost would be cut by [that same] amount because premiums are driven by cost."
(PARROTING THE OLD INSURANCE COMPANY INFERENCE THAT DOCTORS AND NURSES ARE THE REASON FOR HIGH MEDICAL COSTS, EH, KAREN? WHAT ABOUT THE EXCESSIVE SALARIES OF INSURANCE COMPANY BOARDS, OR OF PARASITIC BLOODSUCKERS LIKE YOU LOBBYISTS, KAREN? ALL OF YOU MAKE MORE MONEY THAN MOST DOCTORS)!

ALLEN WISE
CEO, Coventry from 1996-2004, and again since January, 2009
2004 salary: $ 13,052,799
2004-2006 sales of stock: $ 73,695,702
2004-2006 stock options exercised: $ 14,402,564
Value of Hilton Head, SC home: $ 3,275,500

RONALD A. WILLIAMS
CEO, AETNA
2007-2008 salary totals: $ 47,300,112
Value of unexercised stock options: $ 194,496,797
In the top 10 of Forbes' $ 100,000,000 Club

MICHAEL McCALISTER
CEO, Humana
2004-2008 salary totals: $ 150,982,708
2006 stock options exercised: $ 22,294,710
Unexercised stock options: $ 60,865,194
Value of Park City, UT home: $ 6,978,380


It isn't just due to lobbyists that health care reform is having such a tough time getting through Congress. Oh no. William H.T. Bush, George W. Bush's uncle, and Susan Bayh, wife of blue dog Indiana Democratic Senator Evan Bayh, BOTH sit on the Board of WellPoint (whose profits last year totaled $ 2,491,000,000 - that's $ 2.491 BILLION - last year)!


There you have it, folks. THESE are the primary beneficiaries of our unjust and profit-driven private health "care" system, NOT YOU. There is no excuse for the excesses it contains, or for the fact that it now excludes 1 out of every 6.5 of us. It is rife with exploitation. The next time you encounter someone shouting out against a not-for-profit public option for health care in this country, or who wants to disrupt a Democratic Town Hall discussion on health care, direct them to this blog and this post and my previous one. Ask them, "is your health care better, or cheaper, or covers more for the same money than it did 5 or 10 years ago?" Ask them,"do you like paying multimillion dollar board member salaries every year so their salaries and profits can shoot through the roof while your own premiums, deductibles, and co-payments rise and your own wages stay the same or go down?" THEN have them tell me, as Republican Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona has said, that "health insurance doesn't need any more regulation" and that we do not need any health care reform.

This current corrupt system we have MUST be drastically changed! It is a profit maintenance system, not a health care system! Flood your elected representatives with letters, phone calls, and emails, and let them know you want this unjust and exclusionary practice of excessively profiteering off of people's illnesses to STOP! Do it NOW! Do it TMORROW! Do it NEXT WEEK! And DON'T GIVE UP THE FIGHT!

WHY AMERICAN HEALTH CARE COSTS SO MUCH

What we Americans are paying for health care is grand larceny! Costs keep shooting up far faster than inflation and at a rate much higher than do American salaries. As with last summer's ridiculously high $4 per gallon gasoline prices, the main cause is corporate greed, particularly in the health insurance and pharmaceutical industries. Their greed is an indefensible abuse of the marketplace, all the more so at a time when Americans' wages have been stagnating or in decline for years now, and food, energy, and almost all other costs have been on a steady rise.

Health insurance providers love to blame the high cost of health care on doctors, but this is a dishonest claim designed to focus attention away from their own most definite contribution. According to an industry survey done by Merritt Hawkins & Associates, in 2007, 81.29% of all primary care physicians made $225,000 or less annually (and only 8.9% made in excess of $300,000). Surgeons and specialists, of course, drew higher salaries, but their numbers are smaller than those of primary care physicians. And yes, all of these doctors have well-paid staffs including nurses, medical technicians, therapists, x-ray technicians, etc., but their salaries are all much less than that of physicians or surgeons. Not only that, but health insurance companies have large staffs themselves. Now $225,000 or $300,000 may seem like a gigantic amount to a person earing only $25,000 or $50,000 per year, but the number seems less gargantuan when one considers the many years of expensive higher education put in by physicians as well as the colossally high malpractice insurance rates they must pay. So this attempt by insurance companies to use physicians as whipping boys for the high and ever-rising cost of health care is a deliberate deceit.

Now that we have exposed the myth of the massively-overpaid physicians, let's look at the humungous salaries the health insurance and pharmaceutical company CEOs "earn" (steal?). According to an August 23, 2007 WEB MD blog called "Nad About Medicine," in an article entitled "CEO Compensation: Who Said Health Care is in a Financial Crisis?", in 2005 the CEO of United Health Group was paid a staggering $124.8 MILLION, the CEO of Forest Labs got $92.1 MILLION, Merck's CEO got $37.8 MILLION, Aetna's CEO received $22.1 MILLION, Becton-Dickinson's got $10 MILLION, and Eli Lilly's got $7.2 MILLION. Keep in mind, these are only CEO salaries and DON'T include Senior VPs', VPs', or other board members' compensation rates, which are also extremely high. You'll be guaranteed to grab your wallet or pocketbook in terror and puke green if you go to The Industry Reader's website at http://www.theindustryreader.com/index.cfm?account=radar&page=Healthplan_Executive_Co . Here you'll see that, in 2007, the top 6 health plan boards paid themselves a whopping $277,998,793. That same year, the entire Executive, Legislative, and Judicial branches of our government cost us, in comparison, only $95,974,600. Damn few health insurance board members have ever directly saved a life or eased someone's pain. So why should these pigs and their counterparts in the pharmaceutical industry be paid salaries in the MILLIONS while the infinitely better-educated and more valuable physicians be paid only in the hundreds of THOUSANDS? This is unjustifiable, immoral, and we are most definitely not getting our money's worth from these vastly overpaid, leveraged parasite middlemen!

Clearly, with health insurance providers and pharmaceutical companies swimming in mounds of money and excessively profiting off of human illness and suffering, this setup is in need of radical reform. The piggish executives live lives of absolute luxury, while 1 in 7 of us cannot even afford health insurance, and the prospect of cancer treatments or major surgery spells certain loss of property and life savings. This is blatantly wrong and thoroughly evil. Hospitals (even so-called non-profit ones) have become giant money vacuums sucking the public dry. Doctors are being squeezed by health insurance bandits, who are now effectively dictating terms of health care for purposes of profit by cherry-picking whom and what they will cover, how often, and how much. Regrettably, the John Edwards health care plan will not be adopted. It would have truly provided universal health care for all citizens and would have closely resembled plans long in use all over Europe and Canada. It would have also booted the self-serving, profiteering insurance company pigs out of the picture altogether. Instead, we will most likely end up with a version of the Obama plan, which will still be far better than what we have today, but it will unfortunately allow the insurance parasites to still sit at the planning and operations tables. So it will fall short of the mark we truly need to hit. Oh well, I guess 10% of something is better than 100% of nothing...

One parting thought: The next time you are at your doctor's and feel like grumbling at the $15, $20, or $25 co-pay you must pay, just remember that your doctor, just like you, is also getting screwed by the profiteering insurance companies!