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Doug Henwood plan for Healthcare: Nationalize the lot of them (insurers)

2009-09-10T00:01:13Z

I saw this comment on the Institute for Public Accuracy live blog of Obama's speech, which is just starting.

Doug Henwood:

A friend pointed out to me earlier today that the market capitalization--the value of all the outstanding stock--of the publicly traded health insurers is about $150 billion. Add a little premium to sweeten the pot and you could nationalize the lot of them for about $200 billion. The total administrative costs of the U.S. healthcare system, which are greatly inflated by all the paperwork and second-guessing of docs' decisions generated by the insurance industry, are about $400 billion a year. Those administrative costs are about three times what a Canadian-style single payer system would cost. So that means we'd save about $250 billion a year by eliminating the waste caused by our private insurance system.

In other words, the nationalization could pay for itself in well under a year.

That's as simple an explanation as you're going to get. America buying healthcare is roughly the equivalent -- in terms of 'common sense' -- of you going down to Rent-A-Center to get your flat screen television at 400 percent interest.

]]> Here are some more numbers for recent (Aug 2009) market cap for the big insurers. It is simply stunning to think that we waste so much money so that, comparatively speaking, a few people can make so little. It is also stunning to think that the billions of "value" that the health insurers represent is a tiny drop compared to the trillions we'll waste over the next decade because we are forced to follow the religion of "the free market" for a "product" that isn't exchangeable.

Aetna $12.3b market cap

American Independence Corp. $40.4m market cap

AMERIGROUP Corp. $4.3b market cap

Amerisafe $317m market cap

Assurant, Inc. $3.3b market cap

CIGNA Corp.$7.9b market cap

Coventry Health Care, Inc.$3.4b market cap

Health Net, Inc.$1.5b market cap

Humana, Inc. $5.9b market cap

Molina Healthcare, Inc. $508m market cap

Triple-S Management Corp. $335m market cap

UnitedHealth Group, Inc. $32.6b market cap

Universal American Corp. $702m market cap

WellCare Health Plans, Inc. $1.0b market cap

Well Point, Inc. $25.1b market cap

Happy Birthday, Dream Deferred

2008-12-11T05:55:05Z

Today, December 10 2008 is the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Although Americans, particularly Franklin Roosevelt (whose Four Freedoms speech was taken as inspiration), and Eleanor Roosevelt (who regarded it as her greatest accomplishment), were instrumental in the creation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the United States has never lived up to the aspirations of that December day in 1948.

Aside from our having recently committed torture and conducted an illegal invasion of a country that did not attack us, we have failed as a country to promote the declared rights in the UDHR, and have failed to ratify many of the conventions that would make those rights the highest law of the land. And that is why I wish to remind everyone what is in the preamble, and for you to pay particular attention to the underlined words:

Now, Therefore THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY proclaims THIS UNIVERSAL DECLARATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS as a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations, to the end that every individual and every organ of society, keeping this Declaration constantly in mind, shall strive by teaching and education to promote respect for these rights and freedoms and by progressive measures, national and international, to secure their universal and effective recognition and observance, both among the peoples of Member States themselves and among the peoples of territories under their jurisdiction.

As I will show, every organ of American society does not keep this declaration constantly in mind, nor strive to teach and educate Americans about their universal human rights.

]]> You should follow the link and read for yourselves the revolutionary ideas expressed in UDHR, the world's most translated document.

Here are a few that stand out:

Article 25.

(1) Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.

Does that ring a bell? In the recent Presidential debates, Tom Brokaw asked if medical care was a right. Would any person ask such a question in a society that for sixty years had done its best to "strive by teaching and education" to let people know about Article 25? Is it acceptable that American corporate media are not aware of these international agreements? Is not the media one of the organs of society most needed to defend the peoples' rights?

Article 23.

(4) Everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests.

And yet 60 years later Americans still get illegally fired for trying to organize labor unions.

Article 26.

(1) Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages... Technical and professional education shall be made generally available and higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit.

With budget cuts and soaring college debt, we don't even come close to this kind of egalitarian vision. But article 26 is even more bold, declaring:

(2) Education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms. It shall promote understanding, tolerance and friendship among all nations, racial or religious groups, and shall further the activities of the United Nations for the maintenance of peace.

Doesn't sound like just cranking out "productive members of society", i.e. workers -- it's a much richer version of education, with a serious committment to tolerance. In a country that had spent the last sixty years promoting understanding, would it possible to smear a Presidential candidate with the "charge" that "he is a Muslim"?

But wait, there's more to the story of a dream deferred.

The Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination against Women

Adopted 18 Dec 1979 - Not Ratified by the USA (joined in not ratifying by a handful of countries including Iran, Sudan, Somalia)

The Convention on the Rights of the Child

Adopted 20 Nov 1989 - Not Ratified by the USA (joined in not ratifying only by Somalia, a nation with no central government)

The International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights

Adopted 16 Dec 1966 - Not Ratified by the USA

The story of UDHR is indeed an American story, and not just because Americans were so important in its creation. Much as the Declaration of Independence declared rights that were only to be enjoyed by a minority for more than 140 years, we Americans put on paper, in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a standard that we have not come close to meeting for 60 years. Likewise, the rest of the world mostly gets a failing grade. How much longer will we wait?

Lies My (Right Wing) Teacher Told Me

2008-11-23T19:31:24Z

My friends, the last President to raise taxes during tough economic times was Herbert Hoover.

-- John McCain, Oct 7 2008

I continue to see this crap repeated, even here, in spite of the fact that using the series of internet tubes we can actually look this stuff up:

]]> By 1940, US military spending had not yet really ramped up. In fact, it was 1.7 percent of GDP which is far less than it is today. The 1940 number is just a little over half of what the all-time post-World War II low military spending was, in percent of GDP.

And yet the economy was growing for most of FDR's first two terms, prior to the real ramp-up in military spending. In fact, economic growth was at its all-time high in 1936 (over 14 percent!)

Another point worth mentioning is that official unemployment figures normally cited for the period counted people working in government programs as "unemployed". If you adjust unemployment figures and count the people who had "emergency work" (thanks to New Deal programs), by 1940 the unemployment rate had fallen to around 10%. Why is this relevant? Because today's method of counting "unemployed" has all kinds of statistical tricks, such as not counting people who have "given up looking for work". Put another way, if you counted today's unemployment in the pessimistic way that anti-New Dealers do for the 1930s, it would probably come out close to 10% right now (maybe even higher if you count the prison population as "unemployed"!) See for example Kevin Phillips' article (written before the recent bad few months) Numbers racket: Why the economy is worse than we know.

Why is this going to continue to matter? Because in the coming months right wing hacks like Amity Shlaes are going to keep repeating these lies, in their campaign to stop the government from doing something to reverse the present slide.

In 1936, President Roosevelt won re-election in the biggest election landslide in history. He had more than 60.8% of the votes, to Landon's 36.5%. It was a margin of victory of more than 11 million votes -- Obama won by 8.9 million this time around. If you believed the crackpot theories of right wingers that the New Deal did nothing to help, that result could not possibly have happened. The correct explanation is that the people voted for what worked, and today's right wing propagandists are the biggest assembly of professional liars since Goebbels.

Is the rule of law 'off the table', Ms Pelosi?

2008-11-18T08:03:01Z

The Guardian UK tells us

One of Britain's most authoritative judicial figures last night delivered a blistering attack on the invasion of Iraq describing it as a serious violation of international law...

Adding his weight to the body of international legal opinion opposed to the invasion, Bingham said that to argue, as the British government had done, that Britain and the US could unilaterally decide that Iraq had broken UN resolutions "passes belief".

As the Guardian mentions, Lord Bingham isn't the only authoritative judicial figure who has stated that the war against Iraq was a serious violation of international law. Another powerful voice expressing the exact same view was Benjamin B Ferencz, one of the prosecutors at Nuremberg. In addition to condemning the Iraq war as a breach of international law, Mr Ferencz recently stated:

The International Military Tribunal (IMT) at Nuremberg held that aggression was "the supreme international crime" for which leading planners and perpetrators could be held accountable in an international court of law. The legal recognition in 1946 that war-making was not a national right, but an international crime, was the greatest achievement of the trial and the proudest accomplishment of Robert M. Jackson, the highly esteemed United States Supreme Court judge who served as Chief Prosecutor for the United States. Jackson made clear that if law is to serve a useful purpose "it must condemn aggressions by any other nations, including those who sit here now in judgment." The trial was "part of the great effort to make the peace secure." Subsequent Nuremberg proceedings and Tokyo war crimes tribunals confirmed the profound IMT decision...

The most important accomplishment of the Nuremberg trials was the condemnation of illegal war-making as a supreme international crime.

]]> Even if these august legal minds are wrong about the Iraq war, which I obviously doubt, the rule of law means that when confronted with serious evidence as we have ample supply of in the case of Iraq (and have had for years), you must have serious investigations, and if necessary hand out indictments and hold trials.

If Bush is allowed to walk away from the White House lawn to a comfy retirement, future leaders will be emboldened to break the law again. We will make a mockery of the rule of law and destroy "the most important accomplishment of the Nuremberg trials". That will be the lasting legacy of this Presidency, not just the Iraq War itself.

The best way to 'rescue' General Motors is single payer health care

2008-11-09T06:35:25Z

There is some discussion this weekend about the government using bailout money to help General Motors and Ford.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said in a letter to Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson that the administration should consider expanding the $700 billion bailout to include car companies.

Generally speaking, the right-wing corporate media blames the trouble at GM and Ford on labor unions. I would probably place some of the blame on the fact that GM doesn't build small hybrid gasoline-electric cars, but instead seems to make all of its money off gas-guzzling pollute-mobiles the size of the USS Nimitz.

However, a good case can be made that General Motors and Ford don't make money because the United States is plagued by the greatest bureaucratic waste of money in the history of the world: our for-profit health insurance industry.

]]> A recent estimate by Price Waterhouse Coopers put the total amount wasted by our healthcare system at $1.2 trillion per year. A study from 2005 by Boston University put the figure at $950 billion.

Major sources of unnecessary spending include administrative costs and profit in the insurance industry, high prices of prescription drugs and health services and, to a smaller extent, theft and fraud, according to the study.

We spend far more than any other country on healthcare, but get far less for it. US auto companies claim to be burdened by the high cost of healthcare coverage for their workers. That should not be surprising, given the amount of waste in the system. What might be surprising is the Big Three did come out in favor of Universal Health Insurance -- in Canada! Their executives wrote:

The public health care system significantly reduces total labour costs for automobile manufacturing firms, compared to the cost of equivalent private insurance services purchased by U.S.-based automakers; these health insurance savings can amount to several dollars per hour of labour worked. Publicly funded health care thus accounts for a significant portion of Canada's overall labour cost advantage in auto assembly, versus the U.S., which in turn has been a significant factor in maintaining and attracting new auto investment to Canada...
For both employers and workers in the auto industry, it is vitally important that the publicly funded health care system be preserved and renewed, on the existing principles of universality, accessibility, portability, comprehensiveness, and public administration...

So if you want to 'rescue' General Motors and Ford, it seems to me the obvious way to do that and benefit 'main street' at the same time is to pass HR-676, the single payer healthcare bill authored by John Conyers.

Barack Obama at one point acknowledged the need for single payer. Can we hold his feet to the fire? Will executives at General Motors, Ford, and Daimler-Chrysler testify on behalf of a public insurance system for the United States?