health care "reform" that further empowers insurance corporations is not reform....

[mike_c]

I keep reading horror stories about atrocities committed by health insurance corporations-- social atrocities, such as creating an entire class of Americans permanently relegated to poverty or doomed to illness and death, and economic atrocities like paying massive executive bonuses and dividends while raising rates precipitously, grinding the middle class under their boot heels while making record-breaking profits for their investors and executives. These are the signs of a fundamentally greedy industry whose business model amounts to extorting as much as can gotten from their "subscribers" while they are healthy enough to keep the net flow of assets running out of subscribers pockets and into their investors', then discarding them as soon as possible afterward.

Sure, the various democratic health care reform proposals offer some partial solutions to some of the specific abuses of the insurance industry, but they don't-- and can't-- address the real problem, which will simply continue to fester. The medical insurance industry is like an association of vampires. They have to keep the herd of potential victims healthy enough to maintain their resource, but if the herd ever does well, it's only because the blood-suckers left some spare resource untapped. Wasted, in their view. The ultimate business model that most corporations follow, and that the medical insurance industry exemplifies, requires them to take as much as the subscribers can live without, and as long as there is a steady supply of new subscribers, or the existing subscribers can be squeezed a little harder, there are essentially no upper limits on the potential "growth" of industry profits. Patching a few of the most offensive holes in the system won't ever change the greed that is at its heart, and that drives its corporate decision making. If allowed to continue on their present trajectory, medical insurance corporations will continue to evolve toward the point where EVERY scrap of resource not necessary for keeping their subscribers-- victims, really-- just healthy and happy enough to keep them working, so that they're a sustainable resource, every scrap that's left to allow the middle class to exist, is wasted profit from their perspective, and their executives will ultimately be punished by their investors if they don't wage permanent war on the working class.

They're seeking an optimum harvest model, folks, and we are the resource they're exploiting.

Health care reforms that leave medical insurance companies with a means to remain profitable are not genuine reforms. They are a bill of goods being offered to the American people by leaders who seek to maintain the status quo, which seems quite lucrative if you happen not to be part of the resource herd, or even if you just can't admit to yourself that you're one of the herd. For most of us though, the current health care reforms will do some good for some people, while most continue to be squeezed until they have nothing left to lose. That isn't "reform." It's just "new and improved" product marketing for the gullible masses.

[polpilot]

1. $60 Billion for the ins. cos. End of story on reform.

[pecwae]

2. Knr.

[bvar22]

3. Well Said:

"They're seeking an optimum harvest model, folks, and we are the resource they're exploiting."

And the Democratic Party, under its "Centrist" Leadership IS delivering it to them.

"I need a new Party,
One that won't make me sick..."