Evidence of the Bastards

Posted on 10/12/2009 at 11:25 am by Bob Cesca

This AHIP report on the Finance Committee bill is all the evidence anyone should require to prove how criminally despicable the health insurance cartel truly is. The upshot of the report is that if the Finance bill is passed (presumably as-is), health insurance premiums will go up.

But what AHIP, the health insurance lobby, doesn’t confess to in the report is that they’re going to raise premiums anyway. They’re already doing it. Premiums have risen 131 percent in the last ten years — significantly out pacing both wages and inflation — and the rates will continue to rise. In fact, if nothing is done to regulate the cartels, the average family’s annual payout to health insurance premiums will rise from $13,000 to $24,000 by 2019.

The cartels are telling us that if we pass healthcare reform, they’re going to pull the trigger on the gun they’re holding to our heads. Yet if we don’t pass healthcare reform, they’re going to pull the trigger anyway.

Good people.

At this point, were I the White House and the congressional Democrats, I would totally clamp down on these bastards. Nationalize them all. Simply because they’re threatening us with a catch-22. Realistically (nationalization won’t happen), the Democrats ought to cap premiums at 50 percent — at least 50 — below the rate of inflation. Then I would tag the amendment with the words: Suck it, you bastards.

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  • Jan

    This alone should make the wh and Baucus put in a huge public option and essentially run the ins. companies out of business except for the current customers they have.But noooooooooooooooo instead they are going to hand them 40M new customers.This infuriates me.

  • Irish Girl

    The WH and pro-reform advocates should hit back immediately advertising this reality. I’m hearing ads from the HC industry about every 5 to 10 minutes about how rates will go up if reform is passed in Congress. Every time they run that ad, it should be followed with, ‘the HC industry is telling you only half the truth regarding reform. The truth is, your rates are going to go up no matter what because they’re raising them and they have been for the last 10 years. Reform is the only way to make rate increases stop.”Also, John Kyl is running ads VERY frequently about how he is the “protector” of medicaid and senior citizens. It makes me laugh right out loud. I oughta record the ad and then when he comes out against medicare or entitlements, I’ll zing him with it.

  • brutlyhonest

    It’s always shocking when someone conducts a study and “finds” what the client paid them to.

    The real travesty will be when the MSM cite this study as proof that healthcare reform is a bad idea.

  • Eric

    Strategically, this doesn’t make any sense to me. I don’t suppose it’s any part of a health insurance company’s business model to have people ‘like’ them, but this seems destined to push general loathing towards outright hatred. How are Repubs going to plead on behalf of these companies, not that their efforts to date have been all that convincing?Is the timing on this orchestrated to influence the vote on the Finance committee bill tomorrow? Big deal – the ham-handedness of this smells like a desperation move to me.

  • danann

    Oh, you are So onto them.

  • ec

    This report did not analyze what would happen if there was a public option.Also, I am sure that PWC was told how the report was to come out and then came up with the numbers to support that result. For heavens sake, they aren’t going to come up with an answer for which they will not be paid.We already know that the public accounting firms will through away ethics in an instant when money is involved. That was what parts of Sarbanes-Oxley was meant to fix.

  • ceu

    What the report says is that the Baucus bill doesn’t make enough people buy health insurance & the penalty for not buying is too low. Time to fight back with medicare for all!As Anthony Weiner said on MSNBC earlier today, this report is the best reason for having a public option – even if it won’t be an option for those who have shitty private insurance or for employers being drowned in premium costs.

  • ec

    through, throw – oops!