SEND THIS VIRUS TO WASHINGTON!

"Let's take the profit motive OUT OF MEDICINE!"
- Manifesto Joe, Manifesto Joe's Texas Blues -

Enough is enough. We forgotten souls here in the hinterland - ordinary, average citizens all, are far removed from Washington, D.C., and it shows. The overwhelming majority of us don't have six or seven (or eight or nine) figure incomes, and we get taken pretty much for granted by wealthy business executives and our elected officials in Congress all the time. Our struggles apparently aren't understood, or mean very little to those people. They just don't get it.

But it's now time for that to change.

A number of our Senators and Representatives think there is nothing wrong with our health care system, but we know better. The Joe Liebermans, Blanche Lincolns, Tom Coburns, Mitch McConnells, Mary Landrieus, John McCains, Ben Nelsons, Evan Bayhs, Jon Kyls, Michele Bachmanns, Virginia Foxes, John Boehners, Pete Hoekstras, Mike Pences, and Eric Cantors in Washington all seem to think that the current system of for-profit health care delivery is the only way to go, even as it is unattainable for millions and other millions have been excluded from participating in it. These elected officials are evidently unconcerned that millions of others of us can no longer afford health insurance, or that its ever-rising costs are bankrupting individuals and businesses alike. These proponents of the free market apparently believe it is perfectly acceptable for health insurance and pharmaceutical executives to make millions of dollars in annual salaries while denying coverage to many, or pricing medical care and even prescriptions beyond a rate we average, everyday folks can afford to pay. They just don't get it. But WE do.

We understand very well that no one should have to choose between paying for needed drugs and eating, or between paying for medical bills and paying the rent. We understand that, while our wages are frozen or dropping, those of business executives and elected officials keep rising every year, and so do the costs of drugs and medical care we need, shooting up in price well above the rate of inflation. So I got an idea.

Let's give every Representative and Senator in Washington a direct look at the struggles we are now facing due to the rising, out of control costs of health care and prescriptions. ESPECIALLY THE CONSERVATIVE REPUBLICANS AND BLUE DOG DEMOCRATS WHO OPPOSE A PUBLIC OPTION TO HELP CONTROL COSTS. If you are unemployed and without insurance, can't afford health insurance, are elderly on a fixed income and can't afford your donut-hole in Medicare part D, have a pre-existing condition and are excluded from health insurance, or have had health insurance but were booted off it because your chemotherapy or other costs have become too high for your insurance company's liking, SEND YOUR REPRESENTATIVE A COPY OF THE LETTER BELOW (AS SHOWN BETWEEN THE DOTTED LINES), ALONG WITH AN ITEMIZED COPY OF YOUR HOSPITAL BILL, DOCTOR BILL, OR THIS YEAR'S PRESCRIPTION COSTS. In fact, copy and paste the letter between the dotted lines below and send it to everyone in your email address book and ask them to do the same. Just tailor the letter to fit your own circumstances, and send it off to Washington. Here it is:
=============================================
Dear Senator ____________ (or Representative __________):

I am one of your constituents and I desperately need your help. I only make $ ______ per week, and, as you can see from the medical bill I have included with this letter, I now owe $ _________ in medical fees. I want to be able to eat and pay for my rent, heating, and electricity, too, so I am asking a very big favor of you: WILL YOU PLEASE PAY THIS BILL FOR ME? BECAUSE I CERTAINLY CAN'T!

I understand the important need for hospitals, health insurance companies, and pharmaceutical companies to make a good profit, but as you can see, I just can't afford to help them do that anymore. So will YOU help me do this by paying my bill?

Thank you, Senator _________ (or Representative __________). I really appreciate it!

Sincerely,
Your Devoted Constituent,

_________________________________

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We average, everyday, BROKE folks here in the hinterland have been struggling with the deadly virus of beyond-our-means drug and health care costs for far too long now. Perhaps if each of our elected officials gets literally bombarded and smothered with hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of letters and medical bills from each of us across the country, it will finally dawn on them that the flawed for-profit health care system we have is being badly abused, and that the only real cure is a single-payer system like all other civilized countries across the globe have had for years! Let's make this letter go viral all across the internet, and LET'S SEND THIS VIRUS TO WASHINGTON!

A DEADLY PRESCRIPTION PROFIT OVERDOSE

"Let's take the profit motive OUT OF MEDICINE!"
- Manifesto Joe, Manifesto Joe's Texas Blues -

"Tax the very wealthy to make everyone healthy!"
- Vigilante, Sozadee, CA -



A disturbing piece by Duff Wilson has just appeared in the NY Times explaining how the nation's greedy, profit-obsessed pharmaceutical companies have sneakily raised prices on their brand name drugs a whopping 9% at the wholesale level over the past year, even as the Consumer Price Index has FALLEN 1.3% in the same period. This is significant because roughly 78% of all prescriptions sold are brand-name drugs.

Stephen Schondelmeyer, a professor of pharmaceutical economics at the University of Minnesota, has done cost analyses of the drug industry for AARP, the nation's premier advocacy lobbying group for the aged. He has compiled this data, which has been backed up by other Wall Street analysts. He is critical of this increase, as well he should be. Harvard economist Joseph Newhouse found similar increases happened as drug benefits were added to Medicare in 2006. He has said that such increases usually do occur in the face of new health industry legislation. But are they justiofied? Hardly.

Ken Johnson, the senior Vice President of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America trade organization, dismisses Schondelmeyer's criticisms and report as being politically motivated. Yet the numbers speak for themselves, Mr. Johnson, and they say you lie. Industry claims that these price increases are necessary to keep profits at a level needed to sustain proper research and development for new drugs, which is indeed a costly process, lose credibility when you consider that nearly 30% of new drug research and development costs are offset by us consumers and taxpayers in the form of federal tax breaks and subsidies. What these increased prices REALLY pay for are the ever-rising and exorbitant salaries paid pharmaceutical board members and the lavish marketing campaigns now employed constantly on TV to sell new and even established prescription drugs to consumers. That's why we are constantly bombarded with totally aggravating TV ads for Viagra, Levitra, Cialis, Zytec, Boniva, Lamisil, Crestor, and so many others. 30 years ago, far less costly and much less pervasive advertising was done not to consumers, but to physicians, as it should be. This push-pull marketing technique to get us to ask our physicians for specific brand name drugs is something WE are paying for - dearly - in the form of ever-higher prices. This is absolute nonsense!

Speaking of exorbitant industry annual salaries, I focused on the top 10 pharmaceutical CEO members' salaries in my August 17, 2009 post, "Top 10 Reasons Your Prescriptions Cost So Much", and, just as a brief reminder:
No. 1 was Bill Weldon of Johnson & Johnson at $29,500,000
No. 2 was Miles White of Abbott, at $28,300,000
No. 3 was Bernard Poussot of Wyeth at $25,000,000, and
No. 10 was John Lechleiter of Eli Lilly at $13,000,000.
Remember, everybody, these are just CEO salaries. Other board members were also paid salaries nearly as enormous. Such salaries are wholly unjustifiable and indefensible in a country where millions of people are now out of work, without health insurance, or are seniors on fixed incomes.

This industry increase occurs as pharmaceutical companies make a lot of ballyhoo about their voluntary pledge to cut 8% per year over the next ten years off the prices of prescription drugs as their way of complying with the spirit of proposed new health care reform legislation. It is as deceiving as a retailer who marks up his $500 suits to $600 overnight, and then the next day trumpets a "huge $100 off SALE!" As all of us know, this is just a dog and pony show these greedy manufacturers are putting on, as their price rises amply prove.


I CURRENTLY BUY AS MANY OF MY PRESCRIPTIONS AS I CAN ONLINE FROM CANADA, WHERE MY NET COST, EVEN WITH POSTAGE, IS SLIGHTLY MORE THAN HALF OF WHAT IS CHARGED HERE. I URGE YOU TO DO SO AS WELL. They are the exact same drugs manufactured by the exact same American manufacturers as you find here, but at roughly half the price. That, in itself, is a strong argument for a Canadian-style, single-payer health care system!

We Americans are getting a deadly prescription profit overdose from our piggish pharmaceutical industry which is killing our businesses, bankrupting our elderly and chronically ill, and benefitting ONLY very greedy and very overpaid business executives. Conservatives, Republicans, and a number of blue dog Democrats oppose a public option for health care which would exert strong downward pressure on drug prices. They obviously believe corporate profits are far more important than affordability of needed drugs for us taxpayers. Does this make sense to you? It certainly doesn't to me, and that's why these fools must be driven out of office and replaced by progressives in 2010!




Take a good loook at this...it's a picture of your personal and your company's hard-earned money being stolen by greedy wealthy pharmaceutical industry board members for their obscenely high salaries, bonuses, and profits.

WE ARE GETTING RIPPED OFF!

"The GOP only cares about costs when a government program is not lining the pockets of their corporate supporters."
- SJ of Random Thoughts, New York City -

"Tax the very wealthy to make everyone healthy!"
- Vigilante, Sozadee, CA -


Left click on diagram below to make it larger.

As you can plainly see, the percentage of our Gross Domestic Product we Americans pay to maintain our private, for profit "health care" system is 16%, far in excess of what all the nations below us on the chart pay with their supposedly more expensive "socialized medicine" systems. This is an outrage, considering that 15-30% of what we pay goes directly to health insurance and pharmaceutical company CEO salaries and perks, as well as for their advertising and administrative costs (including paying lobbyists ), and that our system does not provide the best across the board health care in the world for us. By contrast, our government-run VA, Medicare, and Medicaid systems' administrative costs add only a mere 4% to the cost of providing health care, and none of that lines anyone's pockets as huge salaries or excessively high profit. We are clearly getting ripped off by the current private, FOR PROFIT system, and this system MUST change!

According to a study prepared by Robert B. Helms, Resident Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, in 1940 America, only 9% of the population had insurance coverage for medical expenses. After World War II, the rise of employer-paid or employer/employee-funded insurance benefit programs saw this figure jump to 62.2%, with an additional 6.8% carrying individually purchased coverage, and 17.5% receiving or co-covered with coverage through public programs. In 2006, a total of 18% had no coverage at all (roughly 1 in every 5.6 of us).

1 in every 6.5 of us now has no health care coverage at all. The number of uninsured is rising every day, yet so are CEO salaries, premium rates, co-pays, and deductibles, well above the rate of inflation. This is unjustifiable, indefensible, and MUST change as well!

In 1940, health insurance premiums took only 0.4% of disposable income.
By 1970, this figure had risen to 2.91%.
It is far higher today, now exceeding 10% for many of us.

According to the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, health insurance premium costs have increased 97% since 2000, FAR ABOVE THE RATE OF INFLATION. In that same period, the level of worker contributions toward health insurance policy costs skyrocketed 107%, while their wage levels remained relatively flat. Many American small businesses have now found it increasinglydifficult or impossible to provide health care for their employees. Health care provider greed and inefficiency is eating up small business profit and workers' paychecks, This is unsustainable. A June 5, 2009 Science Daily report states that, in 2007 (prior to the current economic downturn), 60% of all bankruptcies in the U.S. had their origins in medically-related causes. One illness-related bankruptcy was occurring on an average of every 90 seconds! That number has surely risen since then, and this situation must come to a screeching halt! Yet health insurance and pharmaceutical executives keep raising their prices and continue to stuff their already overflowing wallets with cash, completely unchallenged.

The fact of the matter is this: private health insurance and private care providers have become too expensive to justify their existence any longer. People in "socialized medicine" countries are NOT dropping dead on their streets in droves due to poor quality or outright lack of medical care. Nor are our shores being flooded with millions of desperate Europeans or Asians clinging to driftwood or life rafts in a do-or-die effort to obtain health care here. Their own systems are providing well for them, at a cheaper individual cost than ours, and the cost burden on their businesses and individual finances is far less than what we are experiencing with our greed-ridden, for-profit private system.

The long-awaited Health Care Reform bill just completed by Max Baucus's Senate Finance Committee is a pathetic effort and an insulting waste of time. It is designed for the benefit of the insurance industry, not for the needy uninsured or the average citizen. Rather than guarantee quality health care at an affordable rate to all and provide downward pressure on existing health insurance costs and CEO salaries, it merely floods the insurance industry with millions of mandated new customers, and provides no industry regulation or competition of any kind. It amounts to an added tax on already-overburdened middle class America. This version of a health care reform bill is a loser through and through, and a step in the wrong direction. IT MUST NOT PASS!



We MUST put an end to profiteering off human illness by adopting a non-profit, utility-type health care system! It is the only sane, economical, and moral path to follow!
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Dawn Smith, an aspiring playwright out of Atlanta, GA, was diagnosed with a rare but treatable brain tumor 4 years ago.

Her doctors are ready to treat the tumor, but her insurance company, CIGNA, refuses to pay. The only hospitals qualified to treat her rare condition are "out of network." (CIGNA'S CEO, EDWARD HANAWAY, HAS BEEN PAID $120.51 MILLION OVER THE PAST 5 YEARS AND HAS STOCK OPTIONS TOTALING NEARLY $29 MILLION). Ms. Smith just received CIGNA's last letter.

Dawn Smith will now die because of CIGNA's network limitations (which are in place solely to boost their profit). Please join me and sign a petition to CIGNA's CEO by going to the site below, and SPREAD THE WORD! Thank you. Your action could very well save her life.

http://pol.moveon.org/dawnsmith/o.pl?id=17257-6861634-56tzTyx&T=3

A STAGE IV MALIGNANCY IN THE BODY POLITIC

As we begin the great national debate on solutions for our nagging economic and health care problems, it is not hard to see how deathly ill our economy and government are. A massive tumor of corporate greed has mestastasized throughout both, and it appears as though we are in the final, deadly stage IV of this corporate malignancy. Is there any hope for our survival? The prognosis does not look good.

The ever-rising cost of health care, health insurance, and pharmaceuticals is proving unsustainable. The costs of these items rise well above our rate of inflation. Board members of health insurance and pharmaceutical companies unhesitatingly award themselves multi-million dollar salaries and bonuses as they routinely deny coverage to people with pre-existing conditions who need insurance coverage and aid with prescription costs the most. They also heavily influence methods of treatment and hospital stay lengths, not in the interest of patient well-being and efficiency, but in the interest of their own maximized profit. 1 in every 6.5 American citizens no longer have health insurance, as they either cannot afford it or are refused it altogether. Doctors must continually battle with these companies on treatment methodology. Meanwhile, pharmaceutical companies raise prices at will, and frequently. They charge American citizens DOUBLE what they charge Canadian citizens FOR THE VERY SAME AMERICAN-MADE DRUGS! They claim they need huge profits to conduct expensive research and development, even though AMERICAN TAXPAYERS SUBSIDIZE ROUGHLY 30% OF THEIR R & D COSTS! This is criminal. Instead of a health care system, insurance and pharmaceutical companies are forcing us to ingest their poisonous profit maintenance system. This, too, is criminal. It is also immoral.

This "medical/industrial complex" controls the entire health care operation in the United States, and they want to keep things exactly as they are. They are willing, and will always find the money, to spend over one million dollars a day on lobbyists to influence our legislators to leave this pathetic system as it is, but they are unwilling to cover millions of Americans who need coverage most. They want NO government involvement in the administration of health care, and are spending even millions more on TV and radio ads featuring lies and distortions about government-run health care in an effort to scare the public away from the idea. THE MEDICAL/INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX AND ITS EVER-DEMANDING STOCKHOLDERS ARE THE CARCINOGENS OF CORPORATE GREED WHICH IS KILLING THE NATION. Their presence and influence is everywhere, hence my metaphorical stage IV malignancy description. They are all over the media; they control virtually the entire Republican Party; and they have bought out huge numbers of Democrats as well. Their obsessive profit-grabbing is killing businesses and destroying our economic well-being, and it must be checked before it destroys the entire country.

The only true total cure for this wicked scenario would be for the country to surgically remove these cancerous tumors altogether through the adoption of a fully government-run, single-payer system of health care. But remember, folks: this is a stage IV situation we are in. As such, the total surgery of a single-payer, universal system simply won't happen. But an alternative of successful chemotherapy we can and MUST adopt is called the Public Option. It is our only hope for survival, and will at least keep the stage IV malignancy at bay, and, at best, greatly shrink the horrible tumor which currently strangles us. Below is an outstanding piece by Kevin Drum which appeared in "Mother Jones" (and which I learned about through Yellow Dog's July 14 "Blue In The Bluegrass" blog, http://www.blueinthebluegrass.blogspot.com/). It is a superbly concise summary of what a public option for health care would offer us. Here it is:


"The so-called 'Tri-Committee' healthcare plan has just been released, and it's so called because it's a joint effort from the House committees on Education and Labor, Ways and Means, and Energy and Commerce. It looks pretty good at first glance, but honestly, I haven't read through it in any detail yet. So more on that front later.

For now, though, let's take a look at the PR effort. Here are the talking points from the "What's In It For You?" handout:

WHAT’S IN THE HEALTH CARE REFORM BILL FOR YOU?

Without reform, the cost of health care for the average family of four is projected to rise $1,800 every year for years to come—and insurance companies will make more health care decisions.

America’s middle class deserves better. Here’s what America’s Affordable Health Choices Act means for you:

LOWER COSTS

No more co-pays or deductibles for preventive care
No more rate increases for pre-existing conditions, gender, or occupation
An annual cap on your out-of-pocket expenses
Group rates of a national pool if you buy your own plan
Guaranteed, affordable oral, hearing, and vision care for your kids.

GREATER CHOICE

Keep your doctor, and your current plan, if you like them
More choice, with a high quality public health insurance option competing with private insurers

HIGHER QUALITY

You and your doctors make health care decisions — not insurance companies
More family doctors and nurses will enter the workforce, helping guarantee access
Mental health care must be covered

STABILITY & PEACE OF MIND

No more coverage denials for pre-existing conditions
No more lifetime limits on how much insurance companies will pay
No reason to ever make a job or life decision again based on health care coverage."



This stage IV situation we face IS something we can keep in check with the adoption of a public option. That is why I again urge you to barrage your Representative, your Senator, and even your Governor with a demand for the adoption of a strong, universal public option plan for health care in this country. Do it TODAY! And TOMORROW! And NEXT WEEK, TOO! Thank you. We'll all be much better off for it!

BADLY MISTAKEN PRIORITIES

Shown here are a number of players key to the solving of our national health care problem. Some, like Senator Ted Kennedy, President Barack Obama, and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, are strong advocates of a universal plan which would cover all citizens through the creation of a government-run, "public option" system (similar to Medicare or the VA) to compete with private insurers; some, like Senators John Cornyn and Mitch McConnell, and Minority Leader John Boehner, are adamantly opposed to any government involvement whatsoever; and some, like Senators Ben Nelson, Blanche Lincoln, and Evan Bayh, are caught in-between, not wishing to offend the large pharmaceutical and medival/industrial complex corporations or their constituents, seeing merit in both sides of the argument(or at least saying they do). Though a finished bill has not hit either chamber, lines are already being drawn in the sand without any floor discussion having even taken place yet. It reveals a lot about the mindset and priorities major legislators have.

Proponents of a public option plan point out that most individuals can no longer afford health care on their own, that nearly 50 million citizens have no health insurance, and that the unchecked rising costs of health care are bankrupting businesses and dragging the economy down. They further contend that coverage for health care should be a universal birthright and not a privilege for only those who can afford it. I, my own physicians, and the majority of voters (72% in a recent nationwide poll) support this view. My own physicians have even told me that Medicare and VA health care, being government-run, are working just fine. My elderly father adds a hearty voice of support for how his medical needs have been met through the VA, and even Republican Senator John McCain has praised the VA. Members of Congress and federal employees receive superb "government-run" health care, and I have yet to hear of a single one of them declining it due to the supposed inferiority some claim "government-run" systems have!

Those "caught in the middle" are, in large part, members of Congress who have received huge donations over the years from insurance and pharmaceutical companies. Nearly all are what is termed "blue dog" Democrats (i.e. Democrats who represent more conservative, traditionally Republican areas or states, who were elected last time with slim majorities). These politicians want to hang onto their seats and fear their support for a public option may cause insurance companies, pharma houses, and some of their constituents to turn against them and donate heavily to their next opponents. It would appear on the face of it that these "caught in the middle" types have a severe case of mistaken allegiance and obligation. As representatives and senators whose paycheck comes from taxpayers, their primary concern should be that ALL of their constituents receive good health care, not just some, and that their constituents' employers and businesses not be put out of business due to unsustainable health care costs! Again, their primary job is to look out for the well being of their constituents, not for their own careers or the well being of corporate campaign donors.

Opponents of a public option, overwhelmingly conservative Republicans, want no government involvement or public option at all. They claim that, if given a choice, almost all Americans would choose a public option. Well, if that's the case, then why aren't they doing what most voters want and supporting a public option. Isn't that what they were elected to do, to do what the public wants? Evidently they don't see it that way. They fear that a public option will put private insurers out of business and/or deprive them of profit. Ahhhh---so PROFIT is the priority! They believe that profiteering middlemen like insurance companies should be able to make money off of people's illness and treatment. They believe that it is perfectly fine for insurance company boards of directors to pay themselves millions of dollars each in salaries and benefits while excluding people from coverage, effectively dictating drug dosages and hospital stay lengths, and even refusing to pay for certain treatments ordered by physicians, thereby depriving patients of proper medical treatment. This is all done to ensure enough profit for these greedy middlemen. Public option opponents apparently also see no problem with pharmaceutical and medical supply companies constantly raising their prices at will, well above the rate of inflation. Obviously, these conservatives believe that healthy medical/industrial complex profits are far more important than the health or economic well being of those multi-millions of consumers who are footing the bill in the name of excessive profit.

Public option opponents love to tell scare stories of how health care will diminish, the ability to choose one's own doctor will disappear, and how much more we'll spend on health care if a public option is adopted. I say that is nonsense. I've said it before and I'll say it again: those living in countries with government-run programs are NOT dropping in the streets from neglect, their death rates are NOT dramatically rising, nor is disease running rampant due to the fact that the government is administering their health care. Opponents also love to raise the frightening specter of the government coming between consumers and their doctors. The implication is that government bureaucracy will create a lot of unnecessary paperwork and interfere with a doctor's ability to treat patients. I say this, too, is nonsense. If anything today's private insurers are far more bureaucratic and are creating far more paperwork than these conservatives are letting on. We are jumping through far more hoops and paying far, far more of a bill under the profit-malignant private system we have today than we did 40 or 50 years ago!

I would just as soon take the ridiculously excessive profit and unnecessary privilege out of health care altogether by adopting a public option. If you, too, are fed up with ever-rising drug costs, filthy-rich private insurance executives padding their wallets at your expense while determining whether or not you'll be covered by them, and then dictating from their corporate offices afar just how long you need to be in the hospital or what tests and treatments you can or cannot have, then do as I have just done: WRITE YOUR GOVERNORS, REPRESENTATIVES, AND SENATORS AND LET THEM KNOW IN NO UNCERTAIN TERMS YOU WANT A PUBLIC OPTION FOR HEALTH CARE IN THIS COUNTRY! Tell them you want UNIVERSAL COVERAGE! Tell them you want AN END TO CONSTANTLY RISING DRUG PRICES! Tell them you want AN END TO PROFITING OFF HUMAN DISEASE AND MISERY! Let them know you MEAN BUSINESS, and will do EVERYTHING YOU CAN TO UNSEAT THEM if they don't follow through on this!

Those who are placing a priority on the profit and wealth of businesses and an elite few over the well being of all, or who are placing their own well being before ours, are each guilty of setting badly mistaken priorities. It is up to us to let them know we will not accept this, and to get them back on track. So let them know, and do it today! There is no neutral ground on the issue of universal health care. Silence is complicity.
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LATE BREAKING NEWS! In today's (7/13/09) "Crooks and Liars" blog, there is a piece dealing with Progressive Change for health care reform wherein you can vote on which Senators to target for TV ads about their weak or non-support for a public option. DO IT!

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!