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How Progressives and Liberals Can Hand the Nation's Public Health Care System Over to the Private Insurance Industry
Fourteen easy steps, requiring little or no effort
1) Never mention that private insurers have motive and duty to charge as much money as possible, indefinitely, and to deliver the least level of services as possible, indefinitely.
2) Ignore the fact that top for-profit insurers invest billions of what was ostensibly our health care money into the top health-damaging industries on Wall Street, including cigarette manufacturing, easily the most popularly-despised industry. Do not mention that those in certain income brackets, even anti smokers, may be compelled to provide insurers with revenues for insurers to invest in cigarette manufacturers and even tobacco pesticide suppliers.
3) Ignore that those insurers also invest billions
in
environmentally-destructive industries such as logging, oil, natural
gas
fracking, mountaintop removal coal mining, pesticides, genetically
engineered
crops, and so forth. Proper broadcasting of this info would
inconveniently bring environmentalists and toxics activists and the like into
Single Payer activism.
4) Remain Silent about for-profit insurers' massive investments in military contractors across the board---Lockheed, Boeing, GE, Halliburton"you name it. After all, if that info got out there, next thing you know, anti-war peace activists would join the move against Private Insurers and for Single Payer. Can't have that.
5) Refuse to address the matter of private insurer's huge contributions of what was supposedly our health care money to political candidates that we may oppose. Though this use of premium money undermines voting, election, and democracy principles, and possibly existing law, progressives and liberals must remain silent on this matter for the sake of insurance profits.
6) Do Not address the matter of private insurers providing massive funding, of what was supposed to be our health care money, to lobbying---for legislation we may oppose.
7) Never criticize or expose the health-care-for-all or universal health care groups that are all too happy to give all citizens no option but "affordable" private insurance health coverage. The thought that income-tax-funded health coverage is automatically affordable to all, not to mention less expensive by miles, is not to be tolerated.
8) Avoid any mention of the fact that for-profit insurers invest heavily in pharmaceuticals, even the ones that produce tobacco pesticides, in spite of the conflict of interest that cannot help but result in the insurers' promoting their own investment properties' drugs over others that may be safer, cheaper, and more effective.
9) Avoid questions about how chemical industry-linked insurers will simply not work to provide proper studies or patient diagnoses that may lead to indictment or exposure of their investment-properties' chemicals or other industrial health harming substances. Funding for patients' body-burden checks for industrial toxins and carcinogens is nowhere to be seen in current health care legislation even though such checks are imperative for a patient's medical diagnosis.
10) Never expose or mention that many health insurers invest in firms that conduct cruel animal experiments. Such progressives do not want energetic and active Animal Rights groups messing with the push towards privatization of public health insurance.
11) Do Not Mention that current health care legislation focuses on personal behavior, and exercise, diet, obesity, tobacco plants, and alcohol, but utterly ignores any and all industrial causes of sickness and death, such as pesticides, dioxin-producing chlorine, radiation, worker safety violations, food contamination, industrial pollution, vehicle exhaust, and so on.
12) Never raise a question about mandates being in violation of Constitutional Protections against Compulsory Speech---as so many in certain income brackets will be forced to speak, with words and money, to private insurers. The only ways to opt out would be a) leave the country, b) deplete assets to poverty level, or c) die.
13) Dare not mention that any government-subsidized health care involving private insurers means that everyone's tax money will, in significant part, go to a) private insurer's campaign contributions, b) insurers' lobbying, c) CEO bonuses, d) corporate jets, e) advertising, f) business conventions, g) and brass and furniture polish at corporate headquarters. None of that rises to anywhere near the level of a Public Interest justification to mandate patronage of private insurers, or to justify government subsidies to that industry.
14) And, Do Not Mention that those in income brackets where the mandate kicks in will be paying TWICE to private insurers---once directly, and again on April 15, to pay for those government subsidies for private insurance coverage of lower income brackets. The middle classes don't know how generous they are.
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