While the lighter than air stories grab the media’s
attention, and ours, the private health care industry continues to steal our
lunch.
Yes, the balloon boy’s dad might be charged with
felonies and misdemeanors for his fraudulent story, which used our media and
his son, but what crimes will health care lobbyists and their political arms,
mainly Republicans in Congress, be charged with for their lies,
misrepresentations, and their fear-mongering?
Even though some 60% of Americans want a real choice
in health care coverage, the most cited being the public option, health care
behemoths are fighting against it, including reform that will reduce already
massive profits and pay for executives.
Steve Champlin, a lobbyist for the Duberstein Group who represents America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), urged the GOP not to give comfort to the enemy, those favoring health care reform. “Long before the Republicans discovered that the House bill was a strategy to kill seniors and all that kind of stuff the plan was already unpopular,” he said.
This “death panel” lie has been repeated so much by Republicans and health care lobbyists that they appear to believe it.
If money spent is an indication of the health care
industry’s wish to get rich through our suffering, then their money is betting
on us as cash cows, while treating the sick as though they are expendable – those
rejected for insurance, the underinsured, and even the insured.
Indeed, a Harvard study linked 45,000 deaths per
year to a lack of coverage of health insurance.
Flush with the money saved from denying coverage, in
the first six months of 2009, financial disclosures show that health care
groups spent more than a quarter of a billion dollars to hire lobbyists who can
influence Washington’s deliberations on health care reform.
Add another $125 million for the last quarter of
2009, which does not include lobbying by health insurance groups
surreptitiously backed by health insurance. Last year health groups spent
another $485 million to squelch reform that doesn’t line their pockets. Our
best guess is that by the end of this year, they will have spent well over $1
billion to make sure we get health reform that benefits them much more than us.
You might say it is an investment for them.
According to Dave Levinthal of the nonpartisan center for Responsive Politics,
which compiled the spending numbers, you spend one dollar now and save 10
dollars later. The trouble is the ten dollars they save comes out of our hide.
Pro-reform citizen groups, for which we are often
asked to donate, and unions are spending to influence the debate but their
spending is paltry compared to the well-heeled health care industry.
U.S. Rep. Emanuel Cleaver - watching the health care overhaul in Washington - said lobbyists were so thick it was hard to walk across the street from his office to the Capitol to cast a vote. The drug industry alone has 1,228 registered lobbyists, or 2.3 for every member of Congress.
To thoroughly rebuff the reform effort last summer, the nation's largest insurers, hospitals and medical groups have hired more than 350 former government staff members and retired members of Congress in hopes of influencing their old bosses and colleagues, according to an analysis of lobbying disclosures and other records.
The hirings are part of a record-breaking influence-peddling campaign by the health-care industry, which is spending more than $1.4 million a day on lobbying in the current fight, according to disclosure records.
What are they buying with their millions? They are buying a health care system that the top five private insurers hope will maintain – or enhance -- their $12 billion a year profits. If they get their way, and their money is betting on it, an average of $1 out of every $5 you spend will go to health care, more than double what other advanced countries pay now.
The
corporate media has been compromised as well, for media executives and health
care executives rub shoulders and launch their yachts from the same ports.
The top five private insurers -- Humana,
Wellpoint, Cigna, Aetna, and United Health – own special access to the news.
They and their guns-for-hire lobbyists underwrite just about every pseudo-news
show, including the advocate for Republicans, Fox News.
In fairness, we can say that
corporations grew through our legal system and have been permitted to fleece us
by feckless politicians for well over 2 generations. In fact, both parties have
permitted corporate risk-taking and unregulated greed that gets more reckless
with each crisis corporations perpetrate – the savings and loan crisis mutated
into the housing fraud.
Perhaps we should point to the
politicians as the culprits. After all, the politicians created the corporate
monoliths, who throw money at their feet for favor. That’s what unbridled greed-machines do. Furthermore,
the politicians failed to nurture a people-centered, not-for-profit health care
system since the time of Richard Nixon.
If we don’t get the reforms that we are
entitled to, you only need to look at our federal leaders. They are the ones
that created unconstrained corporate monsters; they handed over health care to
for-profit companies.
Look to both parties of politicians.
Both are taking health care industry money.
Will it be enough for them to betray
the people?
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