Tag Archives: Insurance Lobby

Does your elected representative need to hear from you?

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Change that worksThe emails are flowing in furiously. Senator So & So needs to hear from you; we need your donation to run this ad; our voices must be louder than the interests arrayed against reform. I ask you. On the issue of health reform, climate change, or ending the US wars, does your elected representative still need to hear from you? What sort of amnesia is there in DC, that the party given a mandate in 2008 suddenly lacks for moraL conviction?

Change That Works has organized an AMBULANCE TOUR for Colorado Springs, Canon City and Pueblo on December 8 to keep alive the issue of Health Care Reform, although of course it’s still framed unfortunately to specifications dictated by the insurance lobby as “Health Insurance Reform.”

It may not happen tomorrow at 10am, give or take a sign or two calling HEALTH CARE REFORM A SHAM, but the callous bastards will ultimately get what’s coming to them, being cut out of the middle entirely. Health is a universal human right which the insurance giants will not be able to deny Americans for much longer. Universal health care is a human right There is no moral basis for earning profits by standing between people and the care they need. Universal health care for all. Profiteers to the gallows.

The face of the health insurance lobby

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Nurse Ratchet torments Jack Nicholson and Brad DourifNurse Ratched, to my imagination, was the most despised movie villainess of all time. She didn’t murder anyone, but by the sheer frigidity of her indifference, Nurse Ratched caused debilitating anxiety and heart-break. She’s my nominee for the face of the US health insurance lobby.

When Nurse Ratched –yes, it’s not spelled Ratchet– callously provoked the suicide of Brad Dourif’s vulnerable character in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, I would defy any viewer to deny they wanted to see the evil nurse dismembered. Couldn’t we rekindle a little of that seething anger for those who are obstructing health care reform?

How is their dispassionate defense of our nation’s feudal profit-based medical system any less homocidal than Jeffrey Dahmer? The health insurance business is doing the deed, but their DC lobbyists, like Richard Umbdenstock (AHA), Karen Ignagni (AHIP), Nancy Nielsen (AMA), Billy Tauzin (PhRMA), and David Nexon (AMTA) are keeping would-be rescuers at bay. They’re riding shotgun on genocidal manhunts.

Health coverage triage isn’t some genteel game of music chairs in the waiting room. These are wheelchairs, and the losers who fall are swept out the door and in the gutter. And the for-profit health industry is removing thousands of chairs at a time.

What is this polite respect opponents are showing one another over the immoral behavior of health insurers? Signa and Humana are killers plain and simple. They deny coverage, delay approvals, withhold disbursements, and throw up bureaucratic barriers until their patients are too enfeebled to fight, or too dead to sue.

While the public is made to debate whether our nation can afford to offer health care to its citizens, and feeling like cheapskates for wanting to deprive the insurance industry of its cleverly earned, admirable profits.

We wanted Odysseus, we got Othello

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America needs an Odysseus, obviously, to outwit the Cyclops and put out his eye. Against the all-seeing American health insurance lobby, our politicians are virtually powerless. To overcome this omniscient villainy without an Odysseus, the only hope is to rush the monster all at once — and all at once, put it to the sword. Senators and congressmen may say the industry is too powerful to defy, I do not doubt it. But if all act in unison, the beast’s threats will be its last, and come to naught.

But isn’t that courageous scenario as plausible as hoping Obama could be our Odysseus? Greed is so much more persuasive than cooperation. Pitted against each other, the Senators collect huge bounties from their lobbyists. If they slay the great Insurance dragon, to the jubilant acclaim of their constituents, they gain nothing. A big, collective nothing for their pains.

But it’s a lovely fantasy. Eradicate the damn thing entirely. Exterminate it from root to tentacle. Decapitate the leaders, parade the profiteers before their angry victims, strip their families of their riches, make examples of them all. Put every last of their agents on the unemployment line. Or better, hold truth and reconciliation hearings to let the Little Eichmans face the aggrieved survivors of insurance casualties.

I’d like to see the insurance company employees squirm, in particular those attending the health care town halls, pretending to speak for common citizens, in reality trying to protect their miserable jobs. What if instead they feared for their lives? If we cannot reach their consciences, let us tickle their throats.

If the health care reform debate is going to raise mobs, it should rouse lynch mobs. Call for the blood of the 3rd party criminals, who feather their planes and yachts and mansions with the last breaths of millions.

The media are quibbling about the 46 million uninsured, belittling the number because it’s really only “everyone’s best guess.” What about the rest of us, the uninsured insured, and the under-insured insured. The health insurers take our money, but offer, when a claim must be made, only mediocre coverage, if any at all. Of course only the sick learn they have inadequate coverage.

If you worry the sick do not number enough to sway the American public, be assured the number will only grow bigger. But even if you count only the sick as victims of the insurance crisis, you must consider that the sense of security of the healthy is lost as well.

Until such time that angry Americans can storm the insurance monoliths, because their representatives in DC won’t do it, we hold out hope for a passing Odysseus. Unfortunately what we got was an Othello, against an Iago far too cunning.