From the mainstream media to the blogosphere, everyone seems to be referring to a "bailout" for the health insurance industry. This includes our own healthcare heroine nyceve and, just this past day, Dennis Kucinich, seen in a response to Obama's healthcare speech, where he discusses the impending "bailout" of the insurance and pharmaceutical industries:
http://www.dailykos.com/...
I've been putting off writing this diary for weeks, but I keep seeing and hearing about a "bailout" for the insurance industry. Words matter, as Ralph Nader wrote the other day at http://www.commondreams.org/...:
Ever wonder what’s happening to words once they fall into the hands of corporate and government propagandists? Too often reporters and editors don’t wonder enough. They ditto the words even when the result is deception or doubletalk.
Nader goes on to talk about the healthcare industry:
The raging debate and controversy over health insurance and the $2.5 trillion spent this year on health care involves consumers and “providers.” How touching to describe sellers or vendors, often gouging, denying benefits, manipulating fine print contracts, cheating Medicare and Medicaid in the tens of billions as “providers.”
I always thought “providers” were persons taking care of their families or engaging in charitable service. Somehow, the dictionary definition does not fit the frequently avaricious profiles of Aetna, United Healthcare, Pfizer and Merck.
One word Nader does not mention is "bailout."
A bailout is when a boat is filling with water and about to sink. Think GM and Chrysler. Here are some laid-off auto workers who couldn't afford to patch a hole in the boat:
Here's an old-fashioned team bailout:
What we taxpayers gave to Wall Street banks was not a bailout but a huge gift, also known as a massive transfer of our wealth. Ditto for what Congress may soon give to the already highly profitable insurance companies; not a bailout but a huge transfer of taxpayer wealth.
The insurance and drug companies don't need a bailout. Every time someone, even the most knowledgeable and well meaning progressive, says taxpayers will bail them out, they subliminally convey the message that these industries are in trouble and need taxpayer help. Enough uses of the B word and we'll be feeling so sorry for the poor, sinking insurance companies that we'll gladly fork over a trillion just to keep the inundated insurers afloat. So stop calling it a bailout and call it what it is: a massive transfer of wealth from We the People to the "healthcare" industry.