Insurance // Current

Is Bandy still clowning around?

WASHINGTON – Moderate Senate Democrats threatened Sunday to scuttle health-care legislation if their demands aren't met, while more liberal members warned their party leaders not to bend.
The dispute among Democrats foretells of a rowdy floor debate next month on legislation that would extend health care coverage to roughly 31 million Americans. Republicans have already made clear they aren't supporting the bill.
Final passage is in jeopardy, even after the chamber's historic 60-39 vote Saturday night to begin debate.

Nelson and three other moderates — Democratic Sens. Mary Landrieu of Louisiana and Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas and Connecticut independent Joe Lieberman — agreed to open debate despite expressing reservations on the measure. Each of them has warned that they might not support the final bill.

One major sticking point is a provision that would allow Americans to buy a federal-run insurance plan if their state allows it. Moderates say they worry the so-called public option will become a huge and costly entitlement program and that other requirements in the bill could cripple businesses. "I don't want to fix the problems in our health care system in a way that creates more of an economic crisis," said Lieberman.

The sway held by such a small group of senators has annoyed their more liberal colleagues, who could vote against a final bill if it becomes too watered down.
Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, said he didn't think rank-and-file Democrats would feel compelled to go that far. At the same time, Brown warned Democratic leaders not to make too many concessions.

"I don't want four Democratic senators dictating to the other 56 of us and to the rest of the country — when the public option has this much support — that (a public option is) not going to be in it," said Brown.

The Senate bill would require most Americans to carry insurance and provide subsidies to those who couldn't afford it. Large companies could incur costs if they did not provide coverage to their work force. The insurance industry would come under significant new regulation under the bill, which would first ease and then ban the practice of denying coverage on the basis of pre-existing medical conditions.

More on the story from Associated Press
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091122/ap_on_bi_ge/us_health_care_overhaulWASHINGTON – Moderate Senate Democrats threatened Sunday to scuttle health-care... more

JuliusBC
added this
1 day ago
|
1 comment

Madison Leuchtmann: Girl Denied Insurance Coverage On Verge Of Losing Her Hearing (VIDEO)

As a result of being denied insurance coverage, a six-year-old child in Missouri may... more

ajrmy
added this
4 days ago
|
0 comments

UNCLE SAM : LIVE FROM THE DUMPSTER !

The Critical Unraveling of U.S. Society By David DeGraw The Public Record Nov 19th,... more

WhiteNoise
added this
4 days ago
|
11 comments

Uninsured ER patients twice as likely to die

Uninsured patients with traumatic injuries, such as car crashes, falls and gunshot... more

xiola
added this
7 days ago
|
35 comments

CRASH n BURN! -[Plane Crash Death%]

ONCE AGAIN--------- "Information IS Beautiful" ---------------------AHHHHHHHHHHH!!!... more

remanns
added this
9 days ago
|
2 comments

Democrat-Led healthcare reform could make things WORSE

WHOO! The Democrats in Congress passed a bill! Healthcare for all! Awesome! Right?... more

asherp
added this
9 days ago
|
4 comments

Using Health Savings Accounts for Retirement Planning

The lack of health insurance is one of the biggest reasons more people don't retire... more

mikerowan
added this
10 days ago
|
0 comments

Congressman Dennis Kucinich on His Vote

After voting against H.R. 3962 - Affordable Health Care for America Act, Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) today made the following statement:

“We have been led to believe that we must make our health care choices only within the current structure of a predatory, for-profit insurance system which makes money not providing health care. We cannot fault the insurance companies for being what they are. But we can fault legislation in which the government incentivizes the perpetuation, indeed the strengthening, of the for-profit health insurance industry, the very source of the problem. When health insurance companies deny care or raise premiums, co-pays and deductibles they are simply trying to make a profit. That is our system.

“Clearly, the insurance companies are the problem, not the solution. They are driving up the cost of health care. Because their massive bureaucracy avoids paying bills so effectively, they force hospitals and doctors to hire their own bureaucracy to fight the insurance companies to avoid getting stuck with an unfair share of the bills. The result is that since 1970, the number of physicians has increased by less than 200% while the number of administrators has increased by 3000%. It is no wonder that 31 cents of every health care dollar goes to administrative costs, not toward providing care. Even those with insurance are at risk. The single biggest cause of bankruptcies in the U.S. is health insurance policies that do not cover you when you get sick.

“But instead of working toward the elimination of for-profit insurance, H.R. 3962 would put the government in the role of accelerating the privatization of health care. In H.R. 3962, the government is requiring at least 21 million Americans to buy private health insurance from the very industry that causes costs to be so high, which will result in at least $70 billion in new annual revenue, much of which is coming from taxpayers. This inevitably will lead to even more costs, more subsidies, and higher profits for insurance companies — a bailout under a blue cross.

http://kucinich.house.gov/News/DocumentSingle.aspx?DocumentID=153995After voting against H.R. 3962 - Affordable Health Care for America Act, Congressman... more

remanns
added this
14 days ago
|
0 comments

Do You Know What Will Happen to your Health Insurance?

Some are applauding the House passage of heath care reform. Some aren't. But try to... more

JonRaymond
added this
14 days ago
|
0 comments

Have the mega-rich achieved victory in their class-war?

How rich—and powerful—have today’s rich become? Some numbers can help tell the story. In 1974, the most affluent 1% of Americans averaged, in today’s dollars, $380,000 in income.

Now let’s fast-forward. In 2007, the most recent year with stats, households in America’s top 1% averaged $1.4 million, well over triple what top 1% households averaged back in 1974—and, remember, this tripling came after adjusting for inflation.

Americans in the bottom 90%, meanwhile, saw their average incomes increase a meager $47 a year between 1974 and 2007, not enough to foot the bill for a month’s worth of cable TV.

The bottom line: top-1% households made 12 times more income than bottom-90% households in 1974, 42 times more in 2007.

The numbers become even more striking when we go back a bit further in time and focus not on the top 1%, but on the richest of the rich, the top 400, the living symbol of wealth and power in the United States ever since America’s original Gilded Age in the late 19th century.

In 1955, our 400 highest incomes averaged $12.3 million, in today’s dollars. But the top 400 in 1955 didn’t get to enjoy all those millions. On average, after exploiting every tax loophole they could find, they actually paid over half their incomes, 51.2%, in federal income tax.

Today’s super rich are doing better, fantastically better, both before and after taxes. In 2006, the top 400 averaged an astounding $263 million each in income. These 400 financially fortunate paid, after loopholes, just 17.2% of their incomes in federal tax.

After taxes, as a group, the top 400 of 2006 had $84 billion more in their pockets than 1955’s top 400, $84 billion more they could put to work bankrolling politicians and right-wing think tanks and Swift Boat ad blitzes against progressive candidates and causes.

How could America’s super rich have so little, relatively speaking, back in 1955 and so much today? What has changed between the mid 20th century and the first decade of the 21st? We have lost, simply put, the economic checks and balances that so significantly discouraged grand concentrations of private wealth in the years right after World War II.

[more after the jump]How rich—and powerful—have today’s rich become? Some numbers can help tell the... more

asherp
added this
16 days ago
|
84 comments

Dennis Kucinich: Pro-Corporate Health Care "Reform" is going to make things WORSE

Weird. I just posted a blog on the same issue a few days ago.

asherp
added this
23 days ago
|
0 comments

Public Option Doesn't Fly

I just received the following email from an action group telling people to push back... more

JonRaymond
added this
25 days ago
|
3 comments

Blue Cross Blue Shield: Your Rates Will Increase 11 Percent, and Oppose Competition

The cosmic irony of begging the Grand Inquisitor to heal us is a complete... more

WallStCheatSheet
added this
26 days ago
|
0 comments

New York 9 Arrested

A 19 year old, a med student and an elderly man on Medicare were part of the nine... more

JonRaymond
added this
26 days ago
|
1 comment

Glendale 7 Arrested at CIGNA: What's a Life Worth?

They're at it again. Those pesky health care people who think everyone deserves to live a healthy life, or just plain live, for that matter. 122 people die every day for lack of health care and more for denial of care despite paying high premiums. That's the way it is in America. But some people just can't let it go. What is this, some kind of first world democracy where everyone has equal rights to life?

Seven were arrested today at CIGNA headquarters in Glendale CA, including Dr. Matt Hendrickson, MD MPH, as they sat-in on the CIGNA lobby. Police and CIGNA security barricaded the entrance to the lobby and only allowed "registered" press inside, of which there were very few.

Sit-in supporters chanting "Arrest the Real Criminals" and pointing at the CIGNA building, had to watch from afar through the glass doors as police carried protesters away through the building to a loading dock garage. Protesters then walked around to the loading dock where a Glendale Police motorcycle squad promptly followed them and kept them at a s distance from the garage entrance. Then they closed the garage door enough so that the arrests and their loading into the police van could not be witnessed by protesters, the public, or cameras.

I talked to Shelia Dvorak who was there in support of the sit-in protesters and who was arrested on 10/15/09 for a sit-in at Blue Cross in L.A.'s beautiful downtown financial district. She said she's not afraid of being arrested and was not treated badly, and that in fact the police she talked to sympathized with her. She made a video of that sit-in here: http://mobilizeforhealthcare-la.ning.com/video/blue-cross-sit-in-for-medicare The police arrested the sit-in protesters only in response to CIGNA on charges of trespassing.

Another man who was inside with the sit-in protesters came out when police threatened to arrest everyone. He was carrying a sign that read "What's a life worth?", with a picture of his daughter on it. He had full CIGNA coverage for his family when his daughter was denied treatment for a liver problem and died.They're at it again. Those pesky health care people who think everyone deserves to... more

JonRaymond
added this
26 days ago
|
1 comment

Riverboat Gamblers guitarist run over by car while riding bike

This band is one of my favorites. They've given me much joy, so I will give back.... more

Apocalipstick
added this
30 days ago
|
1 comment

Obama Health Plan Another Tenncare Fiasco

TennCare in Tennessee has been hitting the news more today than at anytime since its... more

Ronnie_Spangler
added this
30 days ago
|
1 comment

Endangered Specied on Health Care

If human beings do not support health care reform we are essentially against the... more

PresidioMediaLab
added this
1 month ago
|
0 comments

How did Americans end up with a system in which employers pay for our health insurance?

Accidents Of History Created U.S. Health System

If you want to understand how to fix today's health insurance system, you'd be smart to look first at how it was born. How did Americans end up with a system in which employers pay for our health insurance? After all, they don't pay for our groceries or our gas.

It turns out there never was any central logic at work. The evolution of the American health care system began in the 1920s, when choices boiled down to which crazy cure you preferred.

Dr. John Brinkley, for instance, was a huge hit in American radio with his health advice shows. For whatever problem folks had, Brinkley had one fabulous solution: transplant a goat gland into your body. He pitched it as being perfect for everything from dementia to impotence to flatulence. But if, somehow, a goat gland didn't cure your ills, you could always use Bonnore's Electro Magnetic Bathing Fluid or Clark Stanley's Snake Oil Liniment.

Before the birth of modern medicine, hospitals were poorhouses where the indigent went to die. Then came the advent of effective medicines, especially antibiotics, along with a revolution in medical schools.

Suddenly, says economic historian Melissa Thomasson, "hospitals are marketing themselves as places to have babies." The professor at the Miami University in Ohio says that in the early part of the 20th century, hospitals were able to focus on happy outcomes.

Health care became much more effective, and much more expensive. Clean hospitals, educated doctors and real pharmacological research cost money. People proved willing to pay for care when they were really sick, but it wasn't yet common to go for checkups or survivable illnesses.

By the late 1920s, hospitals noticed most of their beds were going empty every night. They wanted to get people who weren't deathly ill to start coming in.

"The war economy is an entirely different ballgame," Thomasson says. The government rationed goods even as factories ramped up production and needed to attract workers. Factory owners needed a way to lure employees. She explains that the owners turned to fringe benefits, offering more and more generous health plans.

The next big step in the evolution of health care was also an accident. In 1943, the Internal Revenue Service ruled that employer-based health care should be tax free. A second law, in 1954, made the tax advantages even more attractive.

Thomasson cites the huge impact of those measures on plan participation. "You start from 9 percent of the population in 1940 to 63 percent in 1953," she says. "Everybody starts getting in on it. It just grows by gangbusters. By the 1960s, 70 percent [of the population] is covered by some kind of private, voluntary health insurance plan."

Thus employer-based insurance, which started with Blue Cross selling coverage to Texas teachers and spread because of government price controls and tax breaks, became our system. By the mid-1960s, Thomasson says, Americans started to see that system — in which people with good jobs get health care through work and almost everyone else looks to government — as if it were the natural order of things.

But to Thomasson and other economic historians, there's nothing natural or inevitable about it. Instead, they see it as the profound result of historical accidents.Accidents Of History Created U.S. Health System If you want to understand how to... more

atomiclegion
added this
1 month ago
|
3 comments

Britons have 5 lives

According to insurance company MoreThan, the average Briton cheats death 5 times... more

sophosthegreat
added this
1 month ago
|
3 comments

tagged w/ Insurance

Is Bandy still clowning around?

Madison Leuchtmann: Girl Denied Insurance Coverage On Verge Of Losing Her Hearing (VIDEO)

UNCLE SAM : LIVE FROM THE DUMPSTER !

Uninsured ER patients twice as likely to die

CRASH n BURN! -[Plane Crash Death%]

Democrat-Led healthcare reform could make things WORSE

Using Health Savings Accounts for Retirement Planning

Congressman Dennis Kucinich on His Vote

Do You Know What Will Happen to your Health Insurance?

Have the mega-rich achieved victory in their class-war?

Dennis Kucinich: Pro-Corporate Health Care "Reform" is going to make things WORSE

Public Option Doesn't Fly

Blue Cross Blue Shield: Your Rates Will Increase 11 Percent, and Oppose Competition

New York 9 Arrested

Glendale 7 Arrested at CIGNA: What's a Life Worth?

Riverboat Gamblers guitarist run over by car while riding bike

Obama Health Plan Another Tenncare Fiasco

Endangered Specied on Health Care

How did Americans end up with a system in which employers pay for our health insurance?

Britons have 5 lives

current videos

Girlfriend Texts During Football

People Eating Weird Things

Vampires Can Suck It

Prison Contraband

The Stupid Virus

PSA: Stop Clam Jamming!

about current

watch current

the people are talking

the basics

take us with you

tools

stay in touch

© 2009 Current TV, LLC
All Rights Reserved