Getting prominent play all over the net and all over the nation today is AP's latest contribution to distorting the issues in the healthcare debate.  Today's distorted, one-sided and thoroughly misleading insurance industry propaganda piece was written by someone named Calvin Woodward.  The article is running under the misleading heading "Fact Check" on Yahoo.  It can be found here:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091026/ap_on_bi_ge/us_fact_check_health_insurance

A better heading for the article should have been "Selective Fact Check".  In it, whore Woodward puts forward the industry argument that health insurance companies do not, in fact, make obscene profits.  We all know how badly maligned the health insurance companies are don't we?  You remember them don't you?  They are the heartless assholes that routinely find reasons not to pay insurance claims so they can just keep their heads above water and stay in business right?  They are the people driving a million American families every year into bankruptcy because they can't pay the medical bills and most of them have insurance.  So we all recognize just how unfairly the insurance industry has been treated when critics point out that the profits they make are obscene.

First, let me be clear, the fact that they are profiting AT ALL is obscene and immoral, but let's set that aside for the moment.

Whore Woodward claims on behalf of his patrons in the insurance industry that when one compares the percentage of profit the health insurance parasites reap annually to other industries they don't reall make all that much.  In point of fact, Whore Woodward insists that the profits of the parasites, far from being obscene, are quite modest.

This is, of course, just what one would expect of a whore and particularly a cheap whore who performs the service the client wants for no quid pro quo but simply to foist their own poorly informed opinion on the public.  Anyone with half a lick of sense knows that comparing the percentage of profit of one industry to another is a completely bogus comparison.  Exxon tried to put forth the same dodge when it was racking up record profits just a couple of years ago.  Despite the billions they were raking in just on profit the rapacious oil company tried to claim that because the percentage of profit vs all the money they took in wasn't all that high, that somehow they were then not gouging consumers worldwide.  In that case, as in the present case, since they were sitll in the midst of screwing the public, the public wasn't dumb enough to believe such transparent bullshit.

Whore Woodward claims on behalf of the insurance parasites that compared to other industries the percentage of profits just aren't that big and so the profits couldn't be obscene!  So let's look at just a few insurance companies and the proft they made last year--after taxes:

Wellpoint:  $2.49 Billion

Humana:    $647.15 Million

Aetna:        $1.38 Billion

And that is just the profit reported for three of the bigger insurance companies.  These profits are also what's left after the excessive compensation doled out to their executives and all the other overhead it takes to keep denying claims efficiently.  That these numbers represent only a small fraction of total dollars taken in by the insurance parasites doesn't change the magnitude of the actual amount of money we're talking about one whit!  These profits are indeed obscene given that we have millions who go without healthcare in this country and millions more that pay outrageous sums in premiums that don't adequately cover their medical expenses.  Think how much money would be saved if we simply eliminated these parasites and their companies altogether!  We would have huge amounts of money to put toward actual healthcare.  What a novel idea huh?  A healthcare system that eliminated profit in order to provide more and better care to everyone.  But, God forbid we should discuss that eh?

That Whore Woodward's piece was an excercise in pure pro-insurance industry propaganda being falsey peddled as an objective analysis is not something that informed people will fall for.  However, the group most likely to fall for this transparent bullshit are... other corporate journalists who slavishly reprint what the AP provides them as though it were, in fact, objective when it clearly is not.  This is a blatant and disgusting example of how the AP has whored it's entire operation to the corporate masters of our economy and how it has destroyed it's once vaunted status as a neutral reporter of facts.  There are many, many other examples of the AP shilling for power and wealth in the past year or two and they should no longer be allowed to get away with doing that without being called on the carpet for it.