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Health Insurance CEOs Pocket Average $14.2 Million |
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Earlier this week, we brought you the disturbing news that more than one-third of all Americans went without health insurance for long periods of time during the past two years—mostly because they couldn’t afford the high cost.
Today’s heath insurance news goes way beyond disturbing. It will make you downright angry.
In 2007, the CEOs at the top seven for-profit, private insurance companies pocketed an average of $14.2 million in total compensation. Or as our friends at Insurance Company Rules calculated, the equivalent of the average annual cost ($12,680) of health insurance for 1,127 families of four. Click here for a chart showing the pay of the top seven CEOs.
(Insurance Company Rules is a project of Health Care for America Now, HCAN, that helps bust the myths about health care reform peddled by the insurance industry.)
There is a growing tsunami of support for comprehensive health care reform that includes a public plan as an option for workers and families who either have private insurance coverage or no coverage at all: In other words, competition for the big profit-making private insurers. A public plan option was a big topic at yesterday’s White House Summit on Health Care.
Not surprisingly, the insurance companies, led by the industry group America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP) and far right-wingers, have teamed up to try to kill such a plan and convince the public it would drive up costs, limit coverage and leave millions uninsured.
Why the huge attack against competition? Insurance Company Rules explains:
What they offer is a bad deal for customers and the general public. As the United States Government Accountability Office reported recently, people who have signed up with private Medicare plans (private insurance companies that contract with the government to provide benefits to people with Medicare), can end up having to pay more out-of-pocket than they would under the public Medicare plan (traditional fee-for-service).
But are the plans saving taxpayers money? No! The private fee-for-service plans are actually costing the public 17 percent more than when the government handles the coverage itself.
If consumers discover they can get the same or better coverage at a lower cost, those $14 million paychecks may start shrinking and, who knows, maybe the corporate jets would be grounded.
Click here to check out Insurance Company Rules.
The AFL-CIO has not endorsed a specific health care reform plan but has established certain principles around which any plan should be built (click here for more details).
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“The AFL-CIO has not endorsed a specific health care reform plan …”
WHY NOT? Employers do not want to pay huge costs “for-profit” private health care insurance because it is so expensive. Working people cannot afford even partial premium payments! Thus almost 50 million people in the U.S. have no health insurance. Even then claims for expensive major illness are often denied, and worker in ill-health often go bankrupt trying to pay exhorbitant profit-driven costs. The for-profit health care systems cannot be fixed but must be ended now! Read this article for more understanding of what is happening.
Defending the profits of the health care industry
White House Forum on Health Reform
By Tom Eley
7 March 2009
On Thursday, President Barack Obama hosted a White House Forum on Health Reform. The gathering of politicians, health care industry lobbyists and reform advocates produced no concrete policy proposals. Rather, it advanced broad “guidelines” for reform, all tailored to protect the profits of the major insurance companies, pharmaceuticals and health and medical organizations (HMOs).
The US has the worst functioning health care system of any advanced capitalist country. Currently, nearly 50 million Americans, or one in six, are without health insurance, and a majority of the population carries on with either inadequate or unaffordable insurance plans. Americans pay more per capita for health care than residents of other developed countries, yet generally see worse results. Between private and government spending, health care consumes well over $2 trillion annually. In large measure this money does not go toward providing services, but to line the pockets of health industry CEOs and investors.
(Link to full article here:)
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/mar2009/heal-m07.shtml
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Why aren’t working people getting the full story on single-payer health insurance? Because there has been major media censorship blocking the information. This report was posted on the “progressive” CommonDreams.org
web site by the FAIR organization:
Published on Saturday, March 7, 2009 by CommonDreams.org
Media Blackout on Single-Payer Healthcare
FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting)
(Link to the full story:)
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/03/07-6
Major newspaper, broadcast and cable stories mentioning healthcare reform in the week leading up to President Barack Obama’s March 5 healthcare summit rarely mentioned the idea of a single-payer national health insurance program, according to a new FAIR study. And advocates of such a system–two of whom participated in yesterday’s summit–were almost entirely shut out, FAIR found.
…”
If there is is something more dangerous to our democracy than the idiotic voices of the far
right, and there is, it is the sound of our own thunderous moral silence. In the early to mid years of the Vietnam War the big unions were utterly silent–not the menber mind you, but the unions themselves. Ditto for the Iraq War.
And when they did come out against these wars, it was as reluctant and sheepish acknowledgers and for disgusting practical reasons at that–like cost!
The latest silence, the words they seem unable to call up is ‘SINGLE PAYER”! The American people
have given ample voice to this as their need, but since Hillary said “I know, I know,” Single Payer
has been a not-to-be-spoken-of in the halls of Uniondom. Now we use the vocabulary of cowards, like ‘universal care’.
What a disgusting betrayal of hope. It is no wonder that the day still belongs to our adversaries–with workers getting tossed their reluctant scraps and then voluntarily saying
‘Cheeeese’–on bended knees.
You are a gifted writer…I enjoyed your comment. Keep ‘em coming!
I agree with John G. The AFL-CIO’s failure to endorse HR 676 and strongly advocate single payer is a disservice to all union members.
And JerryWells notes: “The AFL-CIO has not endorsed a specific health care reform plan …” WHY NOT?… > It could be conflicts of interest. Doesn’t the AFL have its own private insurance company? The union movement leadership seems to be more concerned with upholding the private free market capitalist system than making real progressive changes that workers will benefit from, like socialized health insurance.
I agree with the comments from the others on the single payer healthcare. It is a shame that Senator Max Baucus did not allow any single payer advocates at the Whitehouse summit meeting last week. I thought it was supposed to be a meeting for everthing to be put on the table. Where’s the change?? They are all still pandering to the health and welfare insurance companies.
Make no mistake about it, Healthcare and insurance are not the same. What is needed is insuance reform. We are already bailing out AIG who is nothing more than insurance and now when there is a chance for true reform in the health care insurance industry everyone is sitting on their hands.
Here in California we have had single payer on the govoner’s desk twice in as many years and it is winding its way through the state legilature again. I work for a union who represent the clasified employees (bus dirivers, cuostodians, instructioanl assistants, clerical and the like) who don’t make even the money that teachers do and they have to pay for their health insurance even if they work fulltime and the part time workers either get none or have to pay even more than the full time workers. Some work for just their health insuance. We support the single payer system and have from the start. A school district with 6000 employees pays 25 million dollars a year to the insuance compnanies for the privilige to have their employees have health insuance. A single payer system wouldn’t need taxes to support it. Take the money that’s paid to the insuance companies and shift it to pay the healthcare providers. In the majority of the cases the districts will save money even when they pay the employees’ portion. The health care providers make more money even when they take less per person since their base of patients has expanded by millions. People don’t have to give up their doctors or coverage either. Every one wins. The other unions need to get off their duffs and seriously get behind the single payer system. Look at the history of the single payer system in California.
So far HR 676 is the only viable plan for American health insurance because it gets rid of the three “bloodsuckers” in the current health plans: the pharmaceutical companies who gleefully charge whatever they can get away with; the for-profit insurance companies who skim off about 35% of their funds and the medical malpractice lawyers who will gladly take any case, no matter how trivial. Granted, there are some inept doctors and hospitals, but many malpractice claims are just a bid for easy money since it is no secret that insurance companies often pay off malpractice lawsuits just to settle them, whether the case had any merit or not. Extended lawsuits are very expensive and time consuming. HR676 has provisions for legitimate malpractice claims like the VA and Medicare already have. HR 676 just simplifies and cleans up the medical insurance mess we have.
The UAW has just announced a tentative agreement to fund health care through a mechanism tied to stock value at Ford. Gm will be next and if they go bust then what?
In the fall of 2007 I heard a news story in NE Ohio of a company called Copperweld whose Trust fund for health care had gone bankrupt and this was before the economy had started to tank after 8 years of corporate fealty.
What makes us think this won’t be another bait and switch leaving millions more Americans with no health care.
Single Payer will save $ and apply downward pressure on HC
cost increases. We need to go all the way to single payer on a national level!
The whole rationale for a “public option” strategy (that is, having a public health insurance plan competing with existing private ones) was that it would void a head-on confrontation with the insurance industry and therefore be easier to push through Congress than single payer. The assumption was that the public plan wuld fuunction so much more efficiently that it would attract more customers and eventually put private insurance out of business.
Well, private insurers aren’t dummies. They can be counted on to use all their resources to fight anything that threatens their profits. They have denounced the public option as”unfair government competition” and opposed it as vigorously as they oppose single payer.
That being the case, doesn’t it make more sense to stop playing patty-cake and start demanding what most of us really want, and need?
In the current economic and political envoironment, it’s becoming next to impossible for unions to defend the employer-paid health plans we’ve fought for at the bargaining table. Moreover, they don’t help the millions who are losing their jobs right now. But the trend in the Senate right now is to replace job-based with insurance with a Massachusetts-style law requiring everybody to buy insurance. (In Massachussetts, you’re fined over $1,000 if you don’t!) This is what we’re going to be stuck with if we don’t take off the gloves and start insisting that the time is long past in this country when working people should have to pony up to an insurance company for the privilege of seeing a doctor when they’re sick.
The whole rationale for a “public option” strategy (that is, having a public health insurance plan competing with existing private ones) was that it would avoid a head-on confrontation with the insurance industry and therefore be easier to push through Congress than single payer. The assumption was that the public plan would fuunction so much more efficiently that it would eventually put private insurance out of business.
Well, private insurers aren’t dummies. They can be counted on to use all their resources to fight anything that threatens their profits. They have denounced the public option as”unfair government competition” and opposed it as vigorously as they oppose single payer.
That being the case, doesn’t it make more sense to stop playing patty-cake and start demanding what most of us really want, and need?
In the current economic and political envoironment, it’s becoming next to impossible for unions to defend the employer-paid health plans we’ve fought for at the bargaining table. Moreover, they don’t help the millions who are losing their jobs right now. But the trend in the Senate right now is to replace job-based with insurance with a Massachusetts-style law requiring everybody to buy insurance. (In Massachussetts, you’re fined over $1,000 if you don’t!) This is what we’re going to be stuck with if we don’t take off the gloves and start insisting that the time is long past in this country when working people should have to pony up to an insurance company for the privilege of seeing a doctor when they’re sick.