presenting the industry's answer to all these attacks? You can't remember seeing that?
Because, on the left we have Obama and on the right we have the insurance companies executives.
They made a deal.
Posted on 11/16/2013 4:39:06 AM PST by Kaslin
Here is something that is odd.
For the past six years President Obama and the Democrats in Congress have waged a relentless attack on the health insurance industry. In the most recent iteration, the president assures us he is not responsible for the wave of health insurance policy cancellations. The insurance companies are.
Okay, so where is the other side?
When is the last time you saw an insurance industry executive interviewed on a TV talk show, presenting the industry's answer to all these attacks? You can't remember seeing that? I can't either.
Well what about the health insurance industry trade groups, the folks who are supposed to explain to Congress and the general public the industry's position? When is the last time you saw one of those representatives on TV? Can't remember? Nor can I.
Okay, let's try one more option. When is the last time you saw someone from a university or independent think tank giving the health insurance industry side of all the complaints that are being slung their way? Don't bother responding. We both know that answer as well.
I submit that this is not a small matter.
A free society requires the free flow of information. In any public policy dispute, if only one side is heard from, we are likely to get further and further away from the truth. The attackers will find there is no penalty for getting minor facts wrong or shading the truth. That will embolden them to make more serious errors, eventually resorting to downright lying. If the only entity providing any push back is the Washington Post fact checker, we are in real trouble. Roughly 99.99% of the population doesn't read the Washington Post.
But what threatens the foundations of a free society most of all is when it is the government (and its allies in the private sector) who are doing the attacking, and when the reason there is no response is that the victims of the attacks have been threatened and bullied into silence.
I believe that is where we are today ? not just with respect to health insurance, but with respect to health care generally. I'm afraid other industries are not far behind.
During the debate leading up to the passage of the Affordable Care Act, I talked to a number of CEOs of large health insurance companies. I frequently heard such comments as, "Don't tell anyone I told you this" or, "If you use this information, don't mention my name" and even, "Don't tell anyone that we ever had this conversation."
As far as I can tell, things have gotten worse. In fact I don't know any employee of any health insurance company that is willing to go on the record with any statement that is critical of the Affordable Care Act.
Now it's possible that my experience is unique. And I know that there are many readers of this blog who also interact with folks in the industry. So if I'm wrong about this, please correct me in the comments.
The result is unanswered charges that are getting more and more reckless. Within the past two weeks, for example, we have had the president himself, David Axelrod, Zeke Emanuel and others all asserting…
[BTW, have you ever noticed how Republicans in public tend to speak their own mind and as a result all seem to say something different? That doesn't happen to Democrats. When they go on TV they are the epitome of the disciplined message. They all say the same thing, even using the very same words. Have those words been tested before focus groups prior to the Democrats even appearing before the cameras? I would bet so.]
Anyway, back to the most recent charge, which is that under the pre-Obama system insurers cancelled policies after people got sick. Really? So says the president. And Axelrod. And Emanuel.
Hmmm. I remember when one insurer got hit with one of the biggest judgments ever because the insurer would not approve a bone marrow transplant to treat breast cancer (a procedure we all now know doesn't work). Are we supposed to believe that these same companies routinely cancel policies and refuse to pay medical bills just because someone gets sick?
Please, give us an example. I don't believe you.
In the early 1980s (while there was still a Berlin Wall), I went through Check Point Charlie from West Berlin to East Berlin. On either side of the wall, there were the same people with the same culture, same genes, etc. The only difference was a difference of political systems, and because of that difference East Berlin was of course poorer.
After about an hour of touring, though, I sensed that there was some other difference and it took me a while to pin point it. In East Berlin, no one smiled. No one laughed. No one joked. People looked at us and at each other with hesitation and even apprehension. Were we really tourists? Or might we be posing as tourists to report on their behavior?
If I could summarize everything in one word, it would be "fear." The East Germans were afraid. You could see it in their eyes. And that was something you never saw in the West.
So why am I telling you about a 30-year-old experience? Because I sense that same feeling again ? right here, in the United States of America.
Islamofascism is more what it is.
That is not clear to me. The best I can tell is the insurance companies were fully aware of Zerocare's impact and in fact were part of the process that created the monstrosity. There are big profits in mandating insurance coverage for 40 million people and increasing the "quality" of coverage.
They are relatively quiet because they are more than happy to have the blame on Democrats. And know any fix created will only increase their profits as congress will have to subsides the cost to force compliance.
This guy is right. I have talked to more than a few people who feel like this. Very sad America has come to this.
“I submit that this is not a small matter.”
No it isn’t but Mr. Goodman is 40 years late. If the gov’t tried to pull the PC crap that it has been successfully shoving down our throats, say a hundred years ago, the bankers would have HOWLED knowing that they must be complicit and thus blameable.
THAT is the difference Culture makes. We’re on the ride and we’re going where it’s going. We have ceded control.
so what are the options?
(1) The insurance industry is being bullied - one of the largest industries in the US that the Democrats can use as an example for the other large private enterprises to follow suit....because the Democrats know that providing health insure for those that couldn’t get it (or didn’t want it) was an emotional response to a made up crisis???
or
(2) The insurance companies were tired of the capitalist approach at health care and found it more appealing to offer only 1 whole policy for each person that cover such things that may not even be needed - but that money could be transferred over to other insured people that do need it - while the insurance companies rack in a large sum of profit?
uhm....seems like the Dark Side is at work...
Like all liberals he can dish it out but can not take it when the tables are turned around
Likely the largest health insurance companies are doing this from a combination of greed and fear. They play with Obama and get paid off. They don’t play (or speak out) and they go under. Crony Capitalism.
However, they can also go under by following the regs or giving too much away.
As a result, Obama blinked this week: they are going to get subsidies for this latest decree from Obama too.
Rescind and Repeal is the only answer.
Totalitariancare tyrant FORCING lesser crickets-chirping socialists to bite their tongue as his tongue-lashing continues? What is “insurance”?
Legal Plunder Has Many Names - The Law
Now, legal plunder can be committed in an infinite number of ways. Thus we have an infinite number of plans for organizing it: tariffs, protection, benefits, subsidies, encouragements, progressive taxation, public schools, guaranteed jobs, guaranteed profits, minimum wages, a right to relief, a right to the tools of labor, free credit, and so on, and so on. All these plans as a whole — with their common aim of legal plunder — constitute socialism.
Want more?
Here’s some social security “insurance” and medicare “insurance” tossed in for good measure…
FUBO, FUCONgress, FUUSSC, FUlesserplunderers
I tend to agree with Fzob. It could be a little of both - some in the industry in the pocket of the regime and some being cowered into silence - but overall they seem more than willing to go along to make a tidy profit. Since Obama has stated on more than one occasion that the regime’s goal is single payer and that their time window is about 10 yrs., I think at some point they will have to force the health insurance companies out of business. They will do that by making it harder and harder for them to make a profit. The larger ones will most likely eat up the smaller but at some point they will all go under. They are stupid to believe anything this admin. tells them. During that process, we’ll probably hear a few screams from them, but of course, by that time it will be too late in the game for all of us. The time to stop this is now.
Václav Havel was a playwright, essayist and a poet. He was also the last President of Czechoslovakia before it was broken up into the Czeck Republic and Slovaka.
He lived under suffocating socialism. Socialism depends upon a fundamental lie: that society will be better when everyone lives at the expense of everyone else. This required institutionalized lies that had a horribly corrosive effect on humanity. In his famous essay, Power of the Powerless, he wrote:
“...[socialism] touches people at every step, but it does so with its ideological gloves on. This is why life in the system is so thoroughly permeated with hypocrisy and lies: government by bureaucracy is called popular government; the working class is enslaved in the name of the work ing class; the complete degradation of the individual is presented as his ultimate liberation; depriving people of information is called making it available; the use of power to manipulate is called the public control of power, and the arbitrary abuse of power is called observing the legal code; the repression of culture is called its development; the expansion of imperial influence is presented as support for the oppressed; the lack of free expression becomes the highest form of freedom; farcical elections become the highest form of democracy; banning independent thought becomes the most scientific of world views; military occupation becomes fraternal assistance. Because the regime is captive to its own lies, it must falsify everything. It falsifies the past. It falsifies the present, and it falsifies the future. It falsifies statistics. It pretends not to possess an omnipotent and unprincipled police apparatus. It pretends to respect human rights. It pretends to persecute no one. It pretends to fear nothing. It pretends to pretend nothing.
“Individuals need not believe all these mystifications, but they must behave as though they did, or they must at least tolerate them in silence, or get along well with those who work with them. For this reason, however, they must live within a lie. They need not accept the lie. It is enough for them to have accepted their life with it and in it. For by this very fact, individuals confirm the system, fulfill the system, make the system, are the system.”
from: http://bit.ly/4bqmRu
Surely the insurance companies know that they will make a lot of money, but, as the need keeps coming up to raise rates, which they will rise fast, Obama and the dems will demonize those companies 24/7 as the reason. The call will be to get rid of them because the people can’t pay those rates anymore, in favor of single payer.
Just a matter of time.
oh yes - the single payer...another fantastic socialistic program....totally forgot about that end goal
I think they were happy, thinking of all that potential profit. However, they may now be realizing that the government doesn’t like competition, however their support of Obamacare does not give them a leg to stand on.
Great post. I think a lot could be learned from him
The United States has been a fascist state since 1933 when President For Life Franklin Roosevelt began to implement his "New Deal", modeled after Benito Mussolini's program in Italy. The Supreme Court undermined a part of Roosevelt's program when they through out the National Recovery Act but for the most part the program remained intact. Roosevelt broke with Mussolini in 1940 after the invasion of France but the march toward fascism continued in the United States during the war with such programs as tax laws that benefitted employers who provided healthcare for workers while not providing the same sort of deductions to individuals.
If Roosevelt had not died in 1945 the post war period would have probably seen an expansion of fascist regulation in the US. As it was, Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy made no significant effort to expand the regulatory state but did nothing to reverse Roosevelt's usurpations either. Then came LBJ and Nixon who, between them outdid even FDR. It looked for a time as though Carter had provided the straw that broke the camel's back when America's greatest anti-fascist leader, Ronald Reagan, slashed thousands of pages of regulations from the Federal Register and worked to free the economy from the fascist stranglehold that had crippled the great post war expansion.
Reagan unfortunately was not able to close a single cabinet level department. In the post Reagan era, Bush, Clinton and Bush returned to the fascist course, expanding the regulatory state while keeping the anti-regulatory rhetoric. Clinton's attempt to take over healthcare in 1993 lead to a populist uprising that swept Republicans, some of whom were anti-fascist, into power in Congress. The result was at least stalemate. The fascists learned that they needed to boil the frog more slowly. At the same time, left leaning fascists infiltrated the boards of most industry leading corporations. "Deregulation" came to mean something different than it had previously. "Deregulation" just meant a change in the regulatory scheme to benefit supporters of the fascist state. The "Deregulation" of California's power grid in the late 1990s largely discredited the term. It has been largely replace by the term "Reform".
With the coming of Obama and the manufactured financial crisis of 2008, the stage was set for a massive fascist surge. New banking regulations served to minimize competition in the financial services industry and protect the positions of the handful of remaining financial institutions who were, after all, too big to fail. "Green energy" initiatives funneled billions of tax payer dollars into businesses run by reliable campaign contributors who received massive kickbacks for their participation. The centerpiece is of course the "Affordable Care Act", which is neither affordable nor caring. With the Supreme Court's betrayal, the course was set for the next great leap forward. Then the wheels started to come off. The web site didn't work quite right and people's policies started to be canceled. The state supporting media tried their best to spin the tale - it was just a few glitches, only a handful of people were actually loosing their policies and besides, they were substandard policies anyway...
We can hope that the 2014 elections will deliver us a Congress with more backbone than what we have now but it won't happen if the Democrats and pro-fascist Republicans have their way. They control about 90% of the means of propaganda and will be much more effective in getting their message out. Nothing will change if we don't all work hard to make it change. Support populist and anti-fascist candidates at all levels of government. Get involved and stay active. It's a long time until November 4, 2014 and the bad guys can do a lot of damage between now and then.
/end rant
The Trains Shall Run on Time - or there will be hell to pay.
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