“’They are the villains in this. They have been part of the problem in a major way,’ Pelosi said of the insurance industry after her weekly press conference. ‘It's almost immoral, what they are doing,’ she said, referring to industry lobbying against a public insurance plan option. ‘Of course, they've been immoral all along. They are doing everything in their power to stop a public option from happening, and the public has to know about it.’”
“The current system works so well for insurers that they don't even want subsidies, Pelosi claimed. ‘They've had a good thing going for a long time at the expense of the American people and the health of our country,’ she said, adding that it will be tough to keep them from getting their way. ‘This is the fight of our lives.’”
Please read the entire article here:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/07/30/p... Thank God someone on the democratic side has finally grown a pair, and wouldn’t you know it, it’s a woman. It’s about time these insurance companies are called out for what they’ve been doing to the American public and getting away with for decades. They’re the reason costs are so high, services are so slight. They’re the reasons we pay twice as much for health care than any other nation on earth, and still have 50 million plus uninsured.
The only thing I would disagree with Pelosi here is these insurers being “almost immoral;” no, they ARE immoral for what they’ve done to people. Canceling policies for customers who have paid premiums for years once they get a catastrophic illness; denying treatment for policy holders and letting them die; tying up doctors in mazes of paperwork, taking away precious time they could be using to treat patients; recommending specialized treatment for policy holders then denying payment; and overriding medical decisions made by doctors; all this just so they can pocket more loot. If that’s not immoral, I don’t know what is.
These companies have made billions in profits off consumers. Over the years they’ve raised premiums like there’s no tomorrow, while finding new ways to jack their policy holders around. These villains are sitting on obscene piles of money taken over the years, and they are using this money to maintain as much of the status quo as possible, buying off the greedy while scaring off the cowards.
Now, if this bill comes forward without a public option, and they include the clause in there that REQUIRES everyone to buy insurance from these crooks, with the taxpayer making up the difference for those who can’t afford their shyster rates, then the insurance companies stand to receive a trillion dollar windfall, courtesy of the taxpayer. (And I mean damn! We just gave trillions to the banks and Wall Street with *&%$& to show for it!)
What all this boils down to is, as Pelosi said, we’re in for the fight of our lives. Obama said he’s going to veto any bill that doesn’t have a public option. But he’s going to need unprecedented support and backing. Please, if you haven’t done so, call, write, email your congressman. We can’t let them get away with this.
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Thursday, July 30th 2009 at 4:22PM
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