A reminder to our Congress people: This is specifically what commodities are:
Livestock and Meat: Lean Hogs, Pork Bellies, Live Feeder Cattle.
Energy: Light Crude, Heating Oil, Natural and Unleaded Gas.
Metals: Gold, Silver, Platinum and Copper.
Farm and Food: Corn and Soybeans.
Human beings are not commodities and decent Universal Health Care is a moral right of every American Citizen. We the people know exactly what is going on, and the 'dirty little secret' of trying to freeze out the 'public option' is no secret at all. We know exactly what you are attempting to do by freezing out a public option.
If the private insurance companies ever had to compete with a publicly run insurance plan on a level playing field, they would be blown out of the water. That is a fact. That is the truth.
We know, and you know it Senators and Congress people, so can we cut to the chase and fully admit the truth? The truth is that you have blood on your hands for every single dollar you accept as a 'so called donation' to your campaign funds from the private health care industry. The truth is that you no longer work for the American people when you treat them as 'chattel'....as if they were Lean Hogs, Pork Bellies or Live Feeder Cattle.
The truth is that you see the American people as less than human when you are willing to cast a blind eye to their pain and suffering and when you see only 'dollar bills' in your coffers instead of seeing the people who are now ending up in 'coffins' because the private health insurance companies are being allowed to do what can only be called 'systematic murder by inhumane treatment.'
Yes, I said it...I 'went there.' It is murder when any member of Congress votes in favor of a system which would deny a human being a health plan whereby they can afford to purchase their necessary prescription drugs just to stay alive. Congress now see dollars instead of suffering and for that, members of our Congress no longer have the right to call themselves a representative of the American people. They represent the Medical Industrial Complex for the sake of money. Money has become your sole motivating factor as they turn their backs on people who are dying. And it is a disgrace, a national disgrace to see this happening in our nation.
For years, health activists, organizations of the elderly and labor unions have tried to convince Congress to allow citizens and the government to negotiate bulk prices for drugs or to purchase them from Canada, rather than paying full price on the open U.S. market.
Congress has not budged on this or other healthcare reform issues.
Behind the scenes, drug companies, hospitals, insurance companies and doctor organizations spent $400 million in 2005 and 2006 lobbying Congress and federal candidates to enact policies the companies favor, according to Opensecrets, an organization that tracks the records.
"Our government, instead of helping people, is being held hostage by these profit-making companies," Lui told IPS.
According to the Centre for Public Integrity, drug companies recently lobbied against strong safety regulations, and successfully lobbied to include patent protection in trade negotiations with other nations.
"The reason our health system is so crazy is we treat healthcare as a commodity. That really doesn't work. Most countries see it as part of their job to take care of their people," Meizhu Lui, executive director of United for a Fair Economy, told IPS.
Yes, most countries see healthcare as part of their job to actually take care of their people. They do not treat them like hogs or cattle, throwing them to the highest bidder for the almighty dollar. Our system is set up to pay CEO's for ensuring that profit = human suffering.
When former Pfizer CEO Henry McKinnell left the company in 2006, he was given pension, stock and other benefits worth $180 million, according to AFL-CIO Corpwatch.
But CEO William McGuire, of United Health Group, a health insurance company, stands alone. His annual salary in 2005 was $124 million, and he has been provided stock options worth more than $1.7 billion, according to Forbes.com. As part of his retirement package, he and his spouse will receive free healthcare for as long as they live, according to AFL-CIO Corpwatch.
This is not the case for the average U.S. family, Woolhandler said. If a parent becomes too ill to work, they may lose their salary and be unable to pay their health insurance.
"We found that three-quarters of people bankrupted by illness had insurance at the beginning," Woolhandler said.
People who have an existing illness, like asthma, are charged double the price for insurance or may be refused altogether, said Woolhandler, who founded Physicians for a National Health Program, which wants the United States to switch to a government-run healthcare system, as in Canada.
A number of companies made headlines recently by trying to boost their profits through illegal drug marketing schemes, cheating on their taxes or skimping on safety, according to Peter Rost, former vice president of marketing for Pfizer and author of the book "Whistleblower."
Pfizer was recently fined $430 million for attempting to defraud a government program. Schering Plough paid a $500 million fine for manufacturing violations and $345 million for improper marketing of Claritin, an allergy drug, Rost says. The U.S. tax authority, the Internal Revenue Service, has demanded that drug company GlaxoSmithKline pay $7.8 billion in back taxes, while Merck may be facing $2 billion in back tax payments.
http://www.truthout.org/...
The 'only' reason not to include a serious public option for health care is because Congress knows without a doubt it would not only succeed, but that it would literally put the private insurance companies out of business. No more 'betting on the hogs and cows' if that were to happen. No more feeding at the trough of greed and avarice. No more tax dollars to keep the Congress people in their 'fat cat' seats of power.
That is why Congress is 'rigging' the deck right now, and for no other reason. The American people are not fooled by this, so shall we stop all the pretension? Can we stop all the 'dog and pony' shows going on as Congress 'pretends' that the handwriting on the wall of the fact that 75 percent of the American people wanting a public option is being shut out, frozen out, ignored?
We know that private insurers can't compete because we already had this experiment with the Medicare program. When private insurers had to compete on a level playing field with the traditional government-run plan they were almost driven from the market. That is why they got their friends in Congress to pass Medicare Advantage. This program spreads the wealth around by giving the private insurers a subsidy of more than 11 percent per patient. As Congress debates health care reform, we should be very clear what is going on. It is easy to devise reforms that will reduce costs without jeopardizing the quality of care.
That is not the fight. The fight is over whether Congress will leave in place structures that will siphon an ever-larger amount of money out of taxpayers' pockets and put this money in the hands of the insurance industry, the hospitals, the drug companies and the doctors.
Getting a robust public plan, that both individuals and employers can buy into, will be the key indicator of whether Congress is still determined to redistribute income into the hands of the insurers, the drug companies and the rest. A robust Medicare-type plan will not only reduce the insurance industry's tax on our health care, it will also be able to bargain for lower prices from the drug companies, the medical supply companies, and other health care providers.
For this reason, most of the industry is united against any sort of serious public plan. Their latest compromise is a system of small cooperative insurers that will have no bargaining power. That's a cute joke, but it has nothing to do with health care reform.
So, keep hold of your scorecard. Unless Congress creates a serious public plan, you can expect to be hit with the largest tax increase in the history of the world - all of it going into the pockets of the health care industry.
We know who is making money off of this deal, we know who is holding the 'aces' while the American people are being handed cards from the bottom of the deck. If Congress thinks they are fooling anyone, they are not.
As Congress continues the 'raping and pillaging' of the American taxpayer, not satisfied with it's endless pursuit of paying off it's other Corporate masters (Wall Street and the Bankers with our 'other' tax dollars) what is up front and center, on deck as it were, is the next 'largest tax increase' to go directly into the hands of the heath care industry.
Since there are trillions of dollars at stake, the effort is understandable. The basic story is simple. The insurance, pharmaceutical and medical supply industries, along with the hospitals and the American Medical Association, have rigged the deck so that they get rich at the public's expense. They have structured our health care system so that we pay more than twice as much per person as people in other wealthy countries, even though we get worse care by many measures.
The bloat in the health care sector is projected to grow rapidly over the next decade as health care consumes an ever larger share of the economy. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) reports that just the increase in health care spending share of the economy over the next decade will cost us $4.3 trillion. That is equal to a health care tax of $57,000 for an average family of four.
Who benefits from the taxpayers generosity? CMS projects that $1.4 trillion, or $18,500 per family will go to the hospitals. Doctors and the pharmaceutical companies are each expected to score about $550 billion, costing families $7,300. And the insurance industry's share of GDP is projected to rise by $360 billion, or $4,800 for an average family.
These massive transfers are not the result of the wonders of the free market. These folks are getting money out of our pockets because their friends in Congress have rigged the deck so the money flows from us to them. For example, the government grants the pharmaceutical industry patent monopolies that prevent normal competition in the prescription drug market.
Unlike every other country in the world, the United States lets the drug companies use their government-granted monopolies to charge whatever they want. As a result, we pay nearly twice as much for our prescription drugs as people in countries like Canada and Germany.
http://www.truthout.org/...
Our Congress have now become a group of tyrants. They no longer represent the American people and have not for some time. Treating humans as if we were nothing more than commodities, turning their backs on the human element, the human suffering caused by their disconnect is a national disgrace. How long will this continue? Until we demand that they stop treating us like this:
Thank you for your interest.