Why Wall St. and Corporate Insurance Should Get Out of Healthcare

The October 2011 movement brings us these two powerful videos.

We need Wall Street, the health insurance industry and investors out of healthcare; replaced by a publicly financed single-payer, improved Medicare-for-all system. Doctors, health providers and patients should decide healthcare–not Wall Street.

Adara Scarlet’s story.

Dr. Flowers explains why Wall Street should be ashamed of themselves for putting profits before people’s necessities.

6 Comments

  1. Richard Heckler on October 18, 2011 at 3:46 pm

    I am for IMPROVED Medicare Single Payer Insurance for ALL absolutely!!!

    Make IMPROVED Medicare Single Payer Insurance for ALL available to all taxpayers as one of our choices.

    Leave existing insurance on the table for those who enjoy spending large sums of money for medical insurance. What could possibly be more American?

    I want my tax dollars spent on a useful endeavor not on insurance over charges or obscene CEO salaries or golden parachutes or shareholders or special interest campaign funding!!!

    It is time for my tax dollars to support this fiscally prudent IMPROVED Medicare Single Payer Insurance program.



    • Victoria on October 21, 2011 at 10:50 pm

      Why leave existing insurance on the table for anyone? (Or maybe that was just sarcasm, but I know some people promote the idea.) Improved Medicare for all won’t work unless everybody is in it. If members of Congress, for example, can buy their own insurance, we’ll end up with 2 tiers of healthcare.
      The people who think they have excellent health insurance now, are just those who haven’t yet lost their jobs or suffered a severe illness. And we can no longer afford to wait until they do. Even President Obama knows what we should do — he just needs the guts to do it.



  2. Richard Heckler on October 18, 2011 at 3:47 pm

    Call in the FBI and the Grand Jury!!!

    Why on earth do elected officials call in the same people who finance their campaigns to inquire how they should write up health care insurance legislation?

    Has anyone received notice of a class action lawsuit?

    Is there an FBI investigation under way? A Grand Jury investigation underway?

    Why you ask?

    Thursday, June 25, 2009

    Health insurers have forced consumers to pay billions of dollars in medical bills that the insurers themselves should have paid, according to a report released yesterday by the staff of the Senate Commerce Committee.

    At a committee hearing yesterday, three health-care specialists testified that insurers go to great lengths to avoid responsibility for sick people, use deliberately incomprehensible documents to mislead consumers about their benefits, and sell “junk” policies that do not cover needed care. Rockefeller said he was exploring “why consumers get such a raw deal from their insurance companies.”

    The star witness at the hearing was a former public relations executive for major health insurers whose testimony boiled down to this: Don’t trust the insurers.

    “The industry and its backers are using fear tactics, as they did in 1994, to tar a transparent and accountable — publicly accountable — health-care option,” said Wendell Potter, who until early last year was vice president for corporate communications at the big insurer Cigna.

    Insurers make paperwork confusing because “they realize that people will just simply give up and not pursue it” if they think they have been shortchanged, Potter said.

    More on this story:
    http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/24/AR2009062401636.html



  3. Richard Heckler on October 18, 2011 at 3:48 pm

    Moreover, tax dollars also pay for critical elements of the health care system apart from direct care—Medicare funds much of the expensive equipment hospitals use, for instance, along with all medical residencies.

    All told, then, tax dollars already pay for at least $1.2 trillion in annual U.S. health care expenses. Since federal, state, and local governments collected approximately $3.5 trillion in taxes of all kinds—income, sales, property, corporate—in 2006, that means that more than one third of the aggregate tax revenues collected in the United States that year went to pay for health care.

    Recognizing these hidden costs that U.S. households pay for health care today makes it far easier to see how a universal single-payer system—with all of its obvious advantages—can cost most Americans less than the one we have today.

    Medicare must exist in the fragmented world that is American health care—but no matter how creative the opponents of single-payer get, there is no way they can show convincingly how the administrative costs of a single-payer system could come close to the current level.

    More on this matter:
    http://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2008/0508harrison.html



  4. Vashti Winterburg on October 20, 2011 at 10:02 pm

    Wow, Margaret!



  5. Jeff J on April 7, 2012 at 4:56 pm

    Occupy Wall St. Now !!!