The insurance companies suffer from a pre-existing condition: greed. To protect their income stream, they have purchased our elected representatives. As Bill Moyers reported recently, they have hired six lobbyists for every member of congress (including 500 former government workers) and have donated nearly $50 million to the current members of the Senate Finance Committee over the last 10 years.
One day after President Obama stated that the various parties have come closer than ever to finding common ground in the struggle to reform health insurance, the health insurance industry issued a report warning that such legislation would raise the cost of a family's health insurance by an additional $1,700 per year in 2013. This was after months of working behind the scenes to help shape the legislation.
The insurers have shown their true colors, and we can no longer afford to cover them. I propose that we have a health insurance strike.
My model for this strike is the rent strike, during which tenants of buildings owned by bad landlords pay their rent into an escrow account until the issue prompting the strike is resolved.
As I am not a lawyer or an organizer, I don't know what needs to be done in reality to make this work. Conceptually, each insurance company's subscribers would ban together and pay their premiums into an escrow account until a system of universal care with no denial of service is agreed upon.
Obviously, a lot of issues would have to be thought through, most especially what would happen when someone who has been paying into the escrow fund needs medical care. I'm not capable of thinking that through, but I do know that I would love to see how the insurance companies and their lackeys in congress would react to millions of people and businesses withholding their premiums from the health insurance vampires who are sucking us dry.
Perhaps they would start working for us for a change.