I'll keep this short.
If you want to know why we don't have non-profit, universal health care like every other country on the face of the Earth, click here. Thanks for the reminder, Reuters.
Good stuff -- for the rich people in Midtown Manhattan and Greenwich, CT -- below the fold.
WellPoint Inc (WLP.N) said it would pay a dividend to return some of its profits to investors, the third major U.S. health insurer recently to start a substantial shareholder payout.
WellPoint's dividend follows similar moves by UnitedHealth Group Inc (UNH.N) and Aetna Inc (AET.N), showing the country's largest insurers are more confident about their prospects after the passage of a U.S. healthcare overhaul last year created a potentially tougher operating environment.
"They obviously feel pretty comfortable about earnings and cash-flow generation post-reform," Sanford Bernstein analyst Ana Gupte said.
Gupte said WellPoint probably faced greater pressure from investors to pay a dividend after Aetna substantially increased its payout earlier this month. Had WellPoint not announced a dividend, she said, the stock would have come under pressure.
WellPoint shares closed down 0.6 percent at $64.93 on the New York Stock Exchange on Wednesday, in line with the decline for the overall market.
WellPoint, the largest health insurer by enrollment, backed its 2011 profit forecast of at least $6.30 per share and said its board had authorized a stock buyback of $1.6 billion this year.
Oh, and you know how the GOPers and AHIP always tell us that poor, abused health insurance companies make only a penny of profit on the dollar and don't make profits anywhere near as big as other companies? Well, I call BULLSHIT.
Health insurers' shares have performed better than the broader stock market this year after the companies showed investors they can still turn a substantial profit after accounting for the costs of the new healthcare law. Investors also expect a friendlier business environment in Congress after the Republican Party took a majority in the House of Representatives.
Big-profit, private health insurance companies produce nothing of value, shuffle money around and then pay off their rich friends. Meanwhile, Americans go broke paying for their immoral, piece-of-crap product for fear of going even more broke. This is not health insurance -- it is extortion.
And, the fine-Italian-wine-sipping-in-his-hot-tub Aetna CEO will do whatever it takes to keep this extortion racket going. I mean, who wouldn't want his life? (Well, ignore the fact that some of us believe in living moral lives.)
My predecessor in the insurance beat, Diane Levick, wrote a profile of Mark Bertolini who will take over when Ron Williams retires. Here is Diane's story which appeared on the Courant's front page Aug. 26, 2007:
Mark Bertolini and his wife, Susan, just back from Italy in 2001, were sipping Vernaccia di San Gimignano wine in the hot tub of their spacious Avon Mountain home and reveling in their good fortune.
They marveled at their rise from humble beginnings, their two smart and healthy kids, and ``that the world was at peace,'' recalls Mark, a CIGNA executive at the time.
American for-profit insurance companies are literally the most powerful corporations on the face of the Earth -- perhaps only second to big defense. Our lives -- both physical and financial -- are controlled by these corporations in the absence of a, say it with me, public (fucking) option.
They raise premiums till we scream uncle -- and then raise them higher -- because they can, and because it's their fiduciary responsibility as for-profit companies to make as much money as possible (see Reuters link) for their Wall Street "masters," to borrow the words of hero Wendell Potter.
We need to never forget how immoral, how cruel, how unethical, how just plain, damn, fucking wrong our enslavement to King Bertolini is in this country.
Someone whose only job is to push money around gets to live like a king -- paid more than our president, more than our secretary of state, more than our greatest surgeons -- while people just miles away from his mountainside mansion have to beg for care:
Shame on you, insurance company CEOs. How do you look at yourself in the mirror? AHIP, if you're reading this, tell us how you bastards do it -- I say, with complete honesty, I do not know how you people do it in big-profit insurance land.
These bastards, like Bertolini at Aetna and Angela Braly of WellPoint, will never give up their power, their control, their unearned wealth. We need to sleep in the United States Capitol until we have a public option. This is the battle of a generation.