Health Care Conundrum

Dylan Ratigan of Morning Meeting, asked health insurance lobbyist and guest, James Klein of the American Benefits Council ---"Are you in favor of perpetuating the monopoly for health insurance, [i.e.,] the anti-trust exemption?"

Ratigan asked Klein the same question over and over and Klein avoided answering, insisting it was a "charged question."

This is not a charged question.

The reason this question is important, is because most people in this country would have never known or suspected that Health Care Insurance Companies were exempt from the Sherman anti-trust laws. People who go to manufacturing plants, schools, hospitals, and a thousand different types of business offices to work every day, and then go home to meals, cleaning, bathing, homework, lawncare, and another thousand different types of chores, have no time to sit at home and enjoy a leisure browse through the Internet on the latest government fiasco, or news scoop on how they are being ripped off.

There is so much dishonesty now, that it fails to raise the interest of most---except for those who can find a small market niche in working for corporations who want them to put on a public face in town hall meetings.

Wikipedia adds this explanation: the U.S. Supreme Court in Spectrum Sports, Inc. v. McQuillan: outlined that, "The purpose of the [Sherman] Act is not to protect businesses from the working of the market; it is to protect the public from the failure of the market. The law directs itself not against conduct which is competitive, even severely so, but against conduct which unfairly tends to destroy competition itself."

So finally, it has come to the attention of some people that Health Care Insurance Companies are exempt from anti-trust laws --- the only corporate group as a whole, as far as the public knows right now.

You might ask why. I did. But there is no answer except somewhere, somehow, elected representatives heard one side of a story and bought into it---or were bought.

This is not good for you if you are a Republican, because if you are a sincere believer in your own principles, you would tout open and free competition. You might have enough money to become a budding Health Care provider, but in most states, your aspirations wouldn’t have a chance. This has to be very bad news for you because you believe!

You are sold on your theories and want to be able to jump into any market and prove your are better---that is, you believe that Adam Smith was right and that your principles produce the best economic wealth for all people in all nations. This is a solid and concrete precept to you and there are no mitigating factors. You don’t believe in coersive monopolies. You believe in natural monopolies and you think you have the know-it-all to get into the business and provide the best, most efficient Health Care on the market.

If you are a Democrat and are in favor of torte reform, this becomes a huge issue that has developed over the years and makes the anti-trust laws extremely important. You see as soon as it became widely known that Health Care Insurance Companies were defrauding good people with honest insurance claims, the courts filled up with new law suits. That is that dishonest people delighted in a new-found way to become professional litigators and collect millions based on a pyramid of new frauds at the expense of all payers into their insurance programs. The spillover loss to those keeping up with their health care costs has since then skyrocketed.

If you are a Republican or a Democrat, you have to be really scared if tort is reformed and the exemption to the Sherman Anti Trust laws is not dropped. You can’t imagine what it would be like if Health Care Insurance Companies could do what they want on the market and there was absolutely no recourse for you. Can you imagine, wanting to drive from North Carolina to Georgia to receive special heart transplant services and you were suddenly not allowed to get those services? That is not out-of-service, just plain not allowed at all---or at any price. You would have to be fairly certain that there was no chance that you might actually get sick and need medical care.

So somewhere along the line, the Health Care Insurance Companies saw a light at the end of their tort problem tunnel. It was exemption from Trust laws. Think about it. If you were the owner of a big provider, and you were paying out part of your profit to litigants, you would have to stop, or your stock holders would be angry. And where would your millions in compensation come from? It is only you and the stockholders who are the ones making a profit on your medical reimbursements.

If you are exempt from the Trust laws, you are exempt from price fixing. That means if it’s you, the Republican, who wants to jump into the business, you must meet with your competitor and agree to hold all your public customers to a fixed price for a specific service. You might also pass that same type of agreement onto the doctors---you will hold them to a reimbursement ceiling, or set a limit on what they can charge for a service because you must maintain a certain profit margin. Of course, this is already the case.

You must then hold all your suppliers to the same agreement. You can make fifty percent above your costs but you have to make sure we are reimbursed fifty percent as well. The more you charge our providers the more you will have to pay us. If you can’t provide our supplies at the price we want, we will have to go elsewhere . . . to some other supplier like China or Japan. They will give us the price we need to make our profits.

If you are the consumer, you can expect one thing. Less service at a higher cost---all the economic principles that maintain a free market are lost and the market spins out of control. It serves one master---the profit master. So if you need cancer treatments, and the provider doesn’t want to pay for them, many thousand excuses can be brought to the table to bear witness against your need. You can’t have it both ways --- profit and necessary health care. It doesn’t matter what you believe in. You’re screwed!

If you are a Republican or a Democrat, you have to be really scared if tort laws are reformed and the exemption to the Sherman Anti Trust laws is not dropped first. You can’t imagine what it would be like if Health Care Insurance Companies could do what they want on the market and there was absolutely no recourse for you. It could happen!

U.S. Constitution Can No Longer Protect Capitalism

A new movie by Michael Moore, Entitled Capitalism – a Love Story will be released for screening October 1. In the ads that preview the movie, Michael reports that, The richest 1[one] percent of our citizens have more financial wealth than the bottom 95 percent combined.

This is interesting because, no one in my recent memory has ever had the nerve to say anything even remotely negative about capitalism without being branded something --- a communist --- a socialist --- a member of a cult --- something insulting. I am sure that there will be no surprises on the release of this film either. All the ignorant people who refuse to learn facts of our current history will want to burn images of Michael Moore in effigy. Why?

One thing about human nature is that certain instincts tend to guide a person’s thinking and once that mental image or belief system is set in stone, it takes more than a movie, usually more than a lifetime of study, to undo it. What’s worse is that most people will filter every bit of new information through that old belief system and spin it around to fit into the mental box that holds their original premises.

In this case, the original premise is typically based on something learned in childhood, for example, a lesson in 5th grade when the student hears, “We are capitalists – not socialists. We don’t believe in Socialism or Communism. Those are inept and unsuccessful economic models used by other countries. They are not as evil as dictatorships or monarchies. We don’t believe in them either. We are capitalists and we love the USA. And you are free to make as much money as you can in this country.”

So when someone like Michael Moore comes along and says, I think we have an economic system that is unfair, it is unjust, it is undemocratic and goes against the principles we say we believe in, most people will freak out and shut down any new information. How can we undo what we have always believed in---that we are allowed to do business freely? The only thing left for these people to do will be to fling relentless insults, and these days, scream obscenities.

But the bottom line is that Michael Moore is right---that capitalism within our constitutional framework no longer works and for several reasons, some of which are listed below.

One reason is that our country was formed around the U.S. Constitution. See:

Article 1.

Section 1

All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives.

Congress makes the laws. When Congress decided to unleash the bankers and corporate powers in the this country to gamble away your money, charge you outrageous and previously illegal fees for the most minute financial transaction, take away your Christian rights to be guarded against usury [what used to be called extortion and what many thugs on the street used to go to jail for], then you cannot have capitalism. What you have is legalized criminality. Why did they do this?---because they were paid to do this---and with more than just money. They were insured a safe reelection. And there is nothing scarier to an elected representative than losing a seat of power. After all, what could be a more fun job when unemployment is rising?

Section 2

The House of Representatives shall be composed of Members chosen every second Year by the People of the several States, and the Electors in each State shall have the Qualifications requisite for Electors of the most numerous Branch of the State Legislature.

If you analyze the last part of the above paragraph, i.e., they were insured a safe reelection, you will see why the U.S. Constitution is now defied. You see, the people no longer elect their representatives. That power was revoked when corporations started buying the members of congress with huge contributions that insured reelection.

Section 2 – Con.’t

Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons,

Because the people no longer elect their representatives, and because the large corporations do, the people cannot be apportioned their Taxes justly. Why? --- because most huge corporations in this country no longer pay taxes. They can’t afford to if they have to pay each other a million times more than their value. So there is no longer a logical way to pay apportioned taxes.

Section 4

The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and

Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Place of Choosing Senators.

This is no longer enforced. During the last election, the Democratic Party cast off millions of votes based on “Party” rules. Maybe the legislature of each of those states said “OK --- You make the rules.” But they have no right to do that. They must make the rules and then take the heat for whatever happens. According to the Constitution they are supposed to do this. They cannot allow any party – Republican, Democratic, Independent, or the Communist Party to make the rules that govern elections---and certainly, cannot allow them to discard votes cast by American citizens, not unless they change Article I of the Constitution.

Well, this can go on and on. Our U.S. Constitutional protections have been so completely devastated during the past two decades that we are no longer a United States of America. We are a collection of States and people trying to survive under the worst of circumstances and there are no people left in Congress who have the moral fortitudes to undue the mess they brought upon us. And they would gain nothing by trying.

We are a global economy and while you and our journalists were sleeping, the small corporations, turned into giants that not only own your Congress, both republican and democratic officials, were bought with your future. What is good for them is what will succeed.

Who Can You Trust Now?

When the news about Obama’s planned speech to school children raised the collective head of ignorance, I did my little Tweet of – “dumb” in a nutshell, waiting for sanity to emerge from the wild wilderness of political pundits. Now, I wonder! Why have people with such an incredible lack of knowledge been raised to the level of legitimacy?

Comments like brainwashing and indoctrination filled the airways. And there on the news, sitting at a slick desk with lots of colorful swatches of screen shots waving around in the background, a journalist sits tapping his or her cheek with a soulful look and comment such as, Well maybe they have a point there. After all, there was a lesson plan that asked children to write a letter to the president of the United States with his or her own ideas. Let’s discuss this. How radical is that? It could be brainwashing. The next speech will be the proof in the pudding---Indoctrination!

Where does this stuff come from? It’s so nuts!

When I went to school, which was a very long time ago, Joe McCarthy hearings were on television, and even little elementary school children were expected to learn from them---and also from Meet the Press, Bishop Sheen, and William F. Buckley and dozens of others who had something intelligent to say---agree or not.

We were also expected to understand where we lived. We didn’t live in Russia or China or some other place in the world that believed in brainwashing. We were expected to be alert to ideas, learn about them, ask questions, and make a judgment about our opinions which, by the way, we were told to keep to ourselves until we could prove they had a solid foundation of accurate facts to support them, and a sense of propriety and morality associated with our reasoning. We had to prove that we were worth listening to and when we weren’t ready, we faced the worse kind of criticism. The next time we opened our mouths to espouse this or that bit of an opinion, we were prepared.

Now, look at the hyperbole associated with the ridiculousness of Indoctrination and Brainwashing. When I grew up, we learned that brainwashing was a systematic form of abuse against populations who had no access to public libraries, open education, competitive newspapers, or free radio or television. We were taught that in the countries that did not have free and open access to speech and the press used very powerful social demands on their people, often forcing them to work in labor camps or minimally be ostracized from their families and friends. We were taught that punishments to the populations included deprivation of food and basic necessities. We were taught that those who obeyed the powerful were rewarded and those that disobeyed were chastised relentlessly. We were about seven years old on the average, when we were taught this and for some reason, understood the concept---intense, systematic repetitive indoctrination against one’s principles, without access to differing opinions, and while being subjected to repetitive torture, humiliation, and/or isolation, could cause someone to believe in something other than what he or she believed to be the truth.

After that initial debate hit the news, I waited for someone with a lick of sense to explain this, so I could feel a sense of normalcy again. No one did. In fact, I have been waiting for someone, democrat or republican, with real intelligence to say something about how low the intellectual bar has fallen in this country when people can scream insane nonsense, and the pundits, news journalist, etc., fail to offer much in the way of rebuttal. It’s as if they were scared---or never went to school. Today, Walter Cronkite is being honored. I wonder if he was scared by the screamers! I wonder who you can trust now!