I fell ill in the summer of 2007 with something that put me out of work for eighteen months and nearly killed me in the spring of 2008. After much confusion it was finally determined that I had Lyme and I started treatment about a year ago.
Lyme, or more correctly Borreliosis, and a cluster of related infections such as Babeosis, Erlichiosis, and perhaps Tularemia are what the CDC calls an emerging disease. Due to the complexity of diagnosis, length and complexity of treatment, and the harm that they do they’re right on the heels of HIV in terms of the anticipated public health costs over the long term.
Today I capped off a week long $2,040 run of self funded treatment starting with a new specialist and ending with a $849.93 pharmacy bill. I really don’t think I can afford paying some scammer insurance company for a junk policy and funding my own treatment. I sure hope Congress is listening. ... but I fear they already understand things all too well.
The cluster of tick borne illnesses are the devil to treat. The bacteria and protozoans involved have evolved to survive either in a host animal such as deer or rabbits or in the gut of a tick. They sneak, they hide, and the borreliosis bacteria is quite similar to syphilis in its effect but with the added skill of cysting up and hiding from the antibiotics that affect it when it’s in its active spirochete phase.
Insurance companies don’t want to hear that these diseases have serious, long term, disabling effects on the victims and that they must be treated. Consequently they pay the leadership of the Infectious Disease Specialists Association to testify that no such link exists. The IDSA specifies a ten day course of doxycycline and any doctor found doing more, no matter how sick, miserable, and desperate the patient might be, are likely to be put before their state medical board for review. Connecticut not only has an anti-trust judgment against the group but I here tell of a "right to practice medicine" statute specifically crafted to protect doctors against the filth that head the IDSA.
As I understand it one of the health care ‘reform’ proposals Congress has dreamed up is going to force me to pay for insurance. The insurance company will take my money and use it to pay these IDSA dirtbags to testify that what is wrong with me is all in my head, despite the fact that there are tens of thousands of other victims just like me. I looked into the program for the uninsurable they have in my state - $289/month with a $5,000 deductible and no pre-existing conditions for six months. I’d pay $6,734 plus whatever the real treatment costs as you can be sure the ‘experimental’ protocols I’m using wouldn’t be covered. And we’re presuming I’ll still be able to find a doctor allowed to actually treat what’s wrong with me, which the insurance companies will be working against night and day.
Why is Congress voting a plan that slathers on additional costs to our national health care bill that will be dropped straight into the coffers of health insurance companies? If you guessed corruption you’d be on the right track. There is certainly a direct insurance company lobbyist to Congresscritter link, but there’s another layer of corruption under that initial infection, one that’s much like borreliosis, all cysted up and hiding, hoping to escape regulatory notice.
Humor me for a second and follow this link to Yahoo finance. It the balance sheet from Humana’s most recently Securities Exchange Commission quarterly filing. Here are the lines we’re interesting in, slightly edited for your viewing pleasure.
Cash and Cash Equivalents: $1,585,109,000
Investment Securities $4,583,423,000
So Humana holds $4.5 billion in investment securities. Would you care to guess how much of that is AAA rated fully insured fraudulent bullshit churned out by Wall Street over the last decade? I bet a mark to market event for Humana’s longer term investment vehicles will results in stockholders learning that stuff is worth about $0.06 on the dollar. And that $1.5 billion in cash equivalents? Wanna bet there are some U.S. Treasuries in there? Those will absolutely tank in value, too, once the mark to market monster gets loose in all of that crap paper that Wall Street put out.
The health insurance companies are a lot like banks in the eyes of an investor. They take in money, they have operating expenses, and they hold a bubble of cash and short term investments as a reserve. They’re not as heavy in owned assets but their customer base can be viewed in a similar light – a contractually bound ‘asset’ that produces revenue each month.
That contractually bound asset is going to crash – we can’t lose half a million jobs a month without that happening. And in the background those alleged balance sheet assets are almost certainly just as toxic as any other overvalued casino paper that came off the southern tip of Manhattan.
I talked a bit about the parallels between the human body with its parasitic diseases and the same sort of parasitism we see in the Democratic party in a piece entitled Parasitology: Personal & Political just a few days ago.
I hadn’t really intended this evening to write about how tick borne diseases parallel the investment banker borne illnesses plaguing any institution that needs to hold cash and near cash equivalents. I’d never really considered the parallels between the misnamed Infectious Disease Specialists Association and the equally corrupt and infective Securities Exchange Commission, but it is rather obvious in retrospect, isn’t it?
I got better. I did so not with the help of government but in spite of the barriers that were put before me. Do you understand what I’m getting at here? I am the market force making sure my care is done and done correctly. Me, not some Wall Street investment banker, not some insurance company analyst, but ME. And that’s all the market force that is required in a single payer system.
Even so, I don’t think we’re going to get health care reform done. Not because it’s not a good idea, not because it’s not a compassionate thing to do, not because it’s the cheapest route, but for the reason I outlined here that no one wants to talk about: if we have a public option the current subscribers will revolt and immediately flee the insurance companies. They’ll be forced into bankruptcy, that’ll force an inspection of the billions of dollars of synthetic financial instruments they hold, and once theirs are exposed for the crap that they are every other nonsense bond in the world gets the same treatment.
So when they tell you we can’t afford the public option, despite the $150 billion in savings over the various health insurance industry welfare proposals being floated, that assertion may very well still be true. The revelations of the contents of the insurance companies’ balance sheets when the tide of subscriber revenues goes out could very well be a shattering blow to the already tottering mass of worthless, synthetic securities looking over our financial markets.
I used real money today to finish out my $2,040 Lyme treatment adventure; not insurance dollars and not credit. Once we're forced to get honest about what things are really worth the whole world is going to be right where I am, engaged in pay as you go for goods and services. And that's going to mean governments falling around the globe ... perhaps even our own.
(UPDATE: Reader's Digest Version
- public option bankrupts insurance companies
- bankrupt operations have their securities auctioned
- many securities are 'mark to model' - there isn't a market test for their value ... unless some silly operation goes bankrupt and gets their stuff auctioned off
- mark to market replacing mark to model pretty much guts a whole lot of banks, insurance companies, pension funds, etc. Pretty much everything in the world is badly overvalued due to Wall Street basically counterfeiting over the last decade via the creation of synthetic investment vehicles.
- Once mark to market event gets going it's falling dominoes all over the place - businesses going under, tax revenues plunge, shakier governments start to fail. The government failure is no joke - it's already happened in Iceland and there are a lot more who are just one bad event away from joining them.
(UPDATE #2:
Please understand, if I'm right about what happens when the health insurers start to tumble, and tumble they must in order for Americans to be healthy, the problem will not be public health but the effect on the global credit market as health insurance company bankruptcies reveal the true value of synthetic financial instruments they currently hold.
You can't disprove this by bandying about figures on individual health insurance premiums - what would it cost the taxpayers to just wholesale suck up the entire "Investment Securities" line item from every health insurance operation? That's the number you need to know ... because it's the price of single payer/public option/whatever your dream is for U.S. health care.
(Addendum:
Lots of chatter about my supposed 'mental condition' down below. To clarify I am a mildly autistic adult, given to circumscribed interests and I am face blind, so I might appear a bit odd in person. I seemed to do just fine with the crowds at Netroots Nation a few weeks back ...
I was indeed paranoid for about three months earlier this year due to the hydroxychloroquinine I was taking as part of my treatment for Lyme. The effects were quite obvious to me, I wrote a bit about them here, and I ceased taking that particular medication about two months ago. The effects come and go within a day or two of starting or ceasing to take it.