Democracy for Utah - Democracy Begins With You

Public option would prevent 'highly concentrated' healthcare markets (near-monopolies)

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 13:48:34 -0600

Diarist Something the Dog Said at Daily Kos:

In a nut shell, the Health Care Insurance companies are concerned about protecting their near monopolies. The way these companies are going at this is by controlling major portions of a local market, at the State level. The Department of Justice considers a market "highly concentrated" if one company holds 42% of market share. Highly concentrated is just a step or so below a monopoly. This would still not be too bad if the remaining 58% of the market were made up of many other companies competing for business, but in health care this is not the case. In 30 States there is this highly concentrated market. In 12 States (nearly a quarter of the United States) 80% or more of the market is controlled by only the top two health care insurers. [...]

This is why the big companies are so freaked out by the idea of the public option. They can not buy out a government competitor. Since a public option will not be for profit with shareholders who will take a very sweet deal to leave a market, they will not be able to use their deep pockets to buy market share. Worse from their point of view, they will not be able to collude with a public plan to keep rates artificially high, under the premise everyone wins, well everyone except the consumer who only needs health care to stay alive and healthy and happy.

We all know that competition is critical to a well-functioning market, right?

Doing HAARM: Inside a Republican anti-healthcare messaging session

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 19:43:14 -0600

Is it a parody? Or is it real?

"Unfortunately, people have a soft spot for kids with cancer."

Obama: Why would a public plan 'dismantle' private insurers?

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 12:32:30 -0600

Transcript of Obama's Wednesday press conference via NY Times:

QUESTION: Thank you, Mr. President.

Two of the key players in the insurance industry, America's Health Insurance Plans and Blue Cross/Blue Shield, sent a letter to the Senate this morning saying that a government health insurance plan would, quote, "dismantle," end quote, private insurers.

QUESTION: Why are they wrong?

[...]

MR. OBAMA: Why would it drive private insurance out of business? If — if private — if private insurers say that the marketplace provides the best quality health care; if they tell us that they're offering a good deal, then why is it that the government, which they say can't run anything, suddenly is going to drive them out of business? That's not logical.

What we must have in a public-option healthcare plan

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 16:36:37 -0600

Via slinkerwink at Daily Kos, five of the Congressional Progressive Caucus's nine principles for a strong, robust Medicare-like public option:

Available to All. Be available to all individuals and employers across the nation without limitation. […]

Paid for Wellness, not Sickness. Have the ability to structure the provider rates to promote quality care, primary care, prevention, chronic care management, and good public health. […]

Can Negotiate Payments. Establish or negotiate rates with pharmaceutical companies, durable medical equipment providers, and other providers to achieve the lowest prices for consumers.

Equally Supported. Receive a level of subsidy and support that is no less than that received by private plans.

Real Competition. Ensure premiums must be priced at the lowest levels possible, not tied to the rates of private insurance plans.

Tenuous healthcare robs Americans of opportunity

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 16:40:46 -0600

Digby's on a roll today:

I know that most people are covered under their employers, so this doesn't affect them. But there is a sizable population of freelancers, students and self-employed people who are reliant on the individual market. (And the Republicans want to put all of you in it!) We are pretty much slaves to our insurance. We can't even contemplate moving to a new state without taking into account whether or not we will be able to get a new policy. We hate the idea of going to a doctor because it will put a pre-existing condition on the record, thereby making it even more difficult to ever switch. [...]

You cannot have a dynamic, growing economy when people are not able to take risks for fear that they will lose everything they have, even their lives. If you can't change jobs or start a business or move to a place where there are more opportunities for fear of being without health insurance, the whole system slows down.

We've even privatized the rationing of healthcare

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 16:32:03 -0600

Digby:

The idea that the US doesn't ration healthcare is absurd. We certainly do. We just make people do it to themselves out of economic hardship. I guess that's supposed to be a tribute to our sense of individualism and personal freedom.

Hey, nobody's going to tell you you can't be treated — you made that decision all by yourself when you opted not to have a lot of money.

Higher health-insurance premiums can mean lower salary increases

Fri, 19 Jun 2009 15:52:08 -0600

NY Times:

The rapid rise in medical costs has put many employers in a tough spot. They have had to pay much higher insurance premiums, which have increased their labor costs. To make up for these increases, many have given meager pay raises. [...]

Research by Katherine Baicker and Amitabh Chandra of Harvard has found that, on average, a 10 percent increase in health premiums leads to a 2.3 percent decline in inflation-adjusted pay. Victor Fuchs, a Stanford economist, and Ezekiel Emanuel, an oncologist now in the Obama administration, published an article in The Journal of the American Medical Association last year that nicely captured the tradeoff. When health costs have grown fastest over the last two decades, they wrote, wages have grown slowest, and vice versa.

So when middle-class families complain about being stretched thin, they're really complaining about rationing. Our expensive, inefficient health care system is eating up money that could otherwise pay for a mortgage, a car, a vacation or college tuition.

Health insurance co's boot customers for the flimsiest of reasons

Fri, 19 Jun 2009 15:39:40 -0600

LA Times:

An investigation by the House Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations showed that health insurers WellPoint Inc., UnitedHealth Group and Assurant Inc. canceled the coverage of more than 20,000 people, allowing the companies to avoid paying more than $300 million in medical claims over a five-year period. [...]

A Texas nurse said she lost her coverage, after she was diagnosed with aggressive breast cancer, for failing to disclose a visit to a dermatologist for acne.

The sister of an Illinois man who died of lymphoma said his policy was rescinded for the failure to report a possible aneurysm and gallstones that his physician noted in his chart but did not discuss with him. [...]

Late in the hearing, [Rep. Bart] Stupak, the committee chairman, put the executives on the spot. Stupak asked each of them whether he would at least commit his company to immediately stop rescissions except where they could show "intentional fraud."

The answer from all three executives:

"No."

In related news, Dr. Ira Kirschenbaum writes at WebMD that the CEOs for 23 health companies were paid a combined 14.9 billion over the last five years. That's an average of almost $650 million for each CEO. No wonder the industry is terrified of a public option. A public-option plan could charge its customers $3 billion less a year by simply not paying its CEO like a Saudi king.

Should we waterboard anti-choice gunman Scott Roeder?

Tue, 16 Jun 2009 14:15:47 -0600

Zachary Roth at TPM Muckracker:

In a jailhouse interview with the AP over the weekend, Scott Roeder, the anti-abortion zealot who's been charged in the murder of Dr. George Tiller, revealed:

I know there are many other similar events planned around the country as long as abortion remains legal.

Roeder declined to elaborate. That means we have a suspect in custody who has admitted to having knowledge of specific terrorist attacks planned for the future. In order to thwart those alleged plots, we need more information from Roeder — information he doesn't seem likely to give up voluntarily.

By the logic of the ticking time-bomb scenario, we should be waterboarding Roeder already — or at least banging his head against the wall. After all, terror attacks could be imminent, with an unknown cost in terms of human lives and the creation of a climate of fear. It's a no-brainer, right?

A growing storm of right-wing extremist violence

Tue, 16 Jun 2009 14:06:59 -0600

Dave Neiwert, author of The Eliminationists: How Hate Talk Radicalized the American Right, writing at his blog Orcinus:

Eight episodes of right-wing extremist violence in four and a half months. We haven't gone four weeks since February without some poor guy — always with a long history of mental illness, usually with a record of military service and/or domestic violence, and invariably jacked up on a toxic cocktail of white male privilege; us-versus-them enemy seeking; fury at women, blacks and/or Jews; and a belief that the world as he knew it was ending unless he took up arms — taking out his gun and offing innocent Americans in a suicidal bid for glory.

For the record: This is not business as usual. True: there have always been occasional events, usually dismissed by the corporate media as "isolated incidents," the work of "lone wolf shooters" acting for reasons all their own. But you have to go back a long, long way in American history before you come to a place where you find incidents like this happening an average of once every two weeks. And the chattering classes are finally beginning to realize what those of us who've been faithfully watching the right wing for years were telling them a year ago: there's nothing isolated about any of this.

Conan O'Brien On The Healthcare "Debate"

Sun, 14 Jun 2009 21:47:38 -0600

President Obama says he wants to create a national health care plan that's both affordable and easy to use. Yup. Yeah, good. And the insurance industry says they'll fight the plan with congressmen who are both affordable and easy to use.

For Congress, it's all about the money...er, bribes...from for-profit health insurers, providers and Big Pharma. After all, THEY have

GOP Lies About Who's Responsible For Huge Deficit

Sat, 13 Jun 2009 10:23:35 -0600

Sea of Red Ink: How It Spread From A Puddle

President Obama's agenda, ambitious as it may be, is responsible for only a sliver of the deficits, despite what many of his Republican critics are saying.

The Times analyzed Congressional Budget Office figures from 2001 to the present. In January 2001, Clinton was leaving office and the CBO estimated an annual surplus of ~$800 billion a year from 2009-2012. Today we're looking at estimates of an annual deficit of $1.2 trillion for 2009-2012.

You can think of that ~ $2 trillion swing as coming from 4 broad categories: the business cycle, President George W Bush's policies, policies from the Bush years that are scheduled to expire but that President Obama has chosen to extend, and new policies proposed by Mr. Obama.

Why Guaranteed Healthcare Will Not Pass the Congress

Sat, 13 Jun 2009 09:59:33 -0600

In the June 12 Bill Moyers Journal, Bill asks

When you talk about these lobbies, the public seems to want something that tends toward public option, if not single-payer. So how is it possible for these big lobbies to trump what the public and the President seem to want?

And Robert Reich replies

The anti-trust case against Wal-Mart

Thu, 11 Jun 2009 16:12:53 -0600

Harper's Magazine:

Popular notions of oligopoly and monopoly tend to focus on the danger that firms, having gained control over a marketplace, will then be able to dictate an unfairly high price, extracting a sort of tax from society as a whole. But what should concern us today even more is a mirror image of monopoly called "monopsony." Monopsony arises when a firm captures the ability to dictate price to its suppliers, because the suppliers have no real choice other than to deal with that buyer. [...]

The idea that Wal-Mart's power actually subverts the functioning of the free market will seem shocking to some. After all, the firm rose to dominance in the same way that many thousands of other companies before it did—through smart innovation, a unique culture, and a focus on serving the customer. Even a decade ago, Americans could fairly conclude that, in most respects, Wal-Mart's rise had been good for the nation. But the issue before us is not how Wal-Mart grew to scale but how Wal-Mart uses its power today and will use it tomorrow. The problem is that Wal-Mart, like other monopsonists, does not participate in the market so much as use its power to micromanage the market, carefully coordinating the actions of thousands of firms from a position above the market. [...]

Those who would use the word "free" to describe the market over which Wal-Mart presides should first consult with Coca-Cola's product-design department; or with Kraft managers, or Kraft shareholders, or the Kraft employees who lost their jobs. These results were decided not within the scrum of the marketplace but by a single firm. Free-market utopians have long decried government industrial policy because it puts into the hands of bureaucrats and politicians the power to determine which firms "win" and which "lose." Wal-Mart picks winners and losers every day, and the losers have no recourse to any court or any political representative anywhere.

Political journalism in a nutshell

Mon, 08 Jun 2009 15:35:29 -0600

Glenn Greenwald:

There are two sides and only two sides to every "debate" — the Beltway Democratic establishment and the Beltway Republican establishment. If those two sides agree on X, then X is deemed true, no matter how false it actually is. If one side disputes X, then X cannot be asserted as fact, no matter how indisputably true it is.

That pretty much sums it up.