We are getting robbed. And murdered even. Right now the biggest profiteers off the pandemic are…the insurance companies.
How can this be? They have to pay off all those death and illness claims! Easy. They’re already raising their rates for premiums. So you might be out of work, your employer might be struggling to keep up, but surprise — next year your insurance costs are going to skyrocket.
Don’t worry, you still have a “choice” of which company to pay for the right to mug you.
Another example of a failed system.
“Promising coronavirus treatment called off years ago — because Big Pharma didn’t see profit potential” https://www.rawstory.com/2020/03/promising-coronavirus-treatment-called-off-years-ago-because-big-pharma-didnt-see-profit-potential/
Yeah ,and an American health care system is what the bastard tory party would like to introduce to the UK ,bastards ,bastards ,bastards .
Conservatives should never be in charge of anything more important than a broken pencil sharpener, because this is what we get. Collapsing civilization because it turns out nature doesn’t care one whit about things like money or the economy or quarterly profit margins, but conservatives demand that reality worship at the altar of mammon upon which conservatives offer up the rest of us as regular burnt offerings.
Cue the usual centrist/capitalist commentators to lecture us how unrealistic implementing an American UHC system would be and we should just be grateful for St. Barrack’s ACA.
Wendell Potter has been telling this story since before the ACA was passed (I recall seeing him on Rachel Maddow more that once.) IIRC, he predicted that insurance companies would find a way to make shittons of money off the ACA, and wanted a public option included to control for that. It wasn’t, and they did. It is very frustrating to see the transparency of their greed, and not only be mostly powerless to change it, but to even convince others that it’s there.
Meanwhile in Alberta, our conservative provincial government rammed through a budget that included cuts to our health care system around about when this crisis was still in its early days but we were very much aware was going to get worse. If you in the States are able to get universal healthcare passed and past the right-wing SCOTUS, it’ll be very important to never let the Republicans get power ever again. They’re going to want to kill it right away instead of the slow starvation that conservative governments elsewhere have to do with the very popular program, or that they are forced to do with Social Security and Medicare.
Ireland’s government has ordered that ALL private hospitals are now part of the medicare system until the crisis is over. The hospitals complied without argument.
https://www.thejournal.ie/private-hospitals-ireland-coronavirus-5056334-Mar2020/
@Kome – Conservatives can’t be trusted to fix so much as pencil sharpener. If you can’t or don’t want to pay what they ask, well, you can go sharpen your pencil on a rock.
And the country will rise up and say “It is what it is, whaddya gonna do?’ and then sit back down again. We’ve been well-trained in the art of cynical defeatism.
Gee, if only a once and a life time candidate, who had been advocating for medicare for all for HALF A CENTURY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! was running for president. Alas all we had to choose from was Warren, Biden and Pete.
Oh wait…
US private health insurance companies clog system amid Covid-19 pandemic:
Much of the redacted parts in the above excerpt are about the astonishingly poor & slow adaption of telemedicine by the
insurance companiesghouls.The state of California has quietly reported that it expects private insurance premiums to jump 40% next year because of the coronavirus. That is, of course, entirely okay under the ACA, because the ACA caps the percentage of profit but not the size of the premium, meaning that insurance companies seeking higher returns can simply increase their payouts to doctors, pharmacies, and hospitals (or offer new “services”) and charge accordingly to raise their own profits. This is what happened in Massachusetts, the state which had actually implemented the bill the ACA was based on, so any claim that this was an unforeseen loophole is clearly a lie.
Biden, of course, wants to “restore” the ACA to specifically avoid universal care and/or single-payer. If he really gets the nomination — and he still doesn’t have enough delegates yet — we’re all screwed.
Biden ,what a dickhead .
If the health insurance companies do actually end up losing money due to the pandemic, they will probably be begging for a government bailout. Heck, they’ll probably ask for a bailout either way.
@14
And I thought I was cynical.
Seriously though, for profit health insurance makes absolutely no god damned sense.
Moving forward, I say we make all “private” health insurance non profit. Profit and greed have no place in public health.
I do not think the best fasnezf writer in the world could have dreamt up this perverted a system.
And this scam almost made it Gilead Sciences Backs Off Monopoly Claim for Promising Coronavirus Drug
I am beginning to see why US citizens do not have a lot of faith in their government.
the problem with conservatives and the feelings and attitude which for the root is conservatives resist change as they see it “make america great again” is a slogan looking at the past. they cling to the past, to tradition, to the way it was. Traditional values!
the problem is the world that exists does not cling to anything and continues to reform with variations of patterns.
Things change continuously, any ideology or being that can not adopt to changing reality will not do well.
instead of accepting this reality they either deny it or blame some evil force be it human or supper natural as trying to destroy them.
denial of the reality of the health care need and its real cost and how markets actually work plus a fair amount of self serving greed has led us to this position
uncle frogy
@#15, Ray Ceeya:
How about this one, then: for years, every cruise line operating in the US has deliberately headquartered/sailed out of other countries — Disney Cruises in the Bahamas, Celebrity Cruises under Liberia/Malta, and Carnival Cruises in Panama — specifically to avoid US tax, hygiene, and unemployment law, and now they’re uniformly applying to the US for bailouts.
@ Kome “…..it is true that most stupid people are conservatives. Part of a JS Mill quote
birgerjohansson@1–
Not to defend pharmacos, but this is not a failing of theirs. It was never going to be a profitable enterprise, which means it should not fall to profit-driven entities to resolve it. This is the sort of project that 100% should have been driven by government. The reason that didn’t happen is because we’re living in the shadow of 40 years of vampiric plutocracy.
So, serious question: when do we start burning these people alive or otherwise taking the law into our own hands? Our government has abandoned us, arguably in Clinton’s second term. Laws and lawmakers are for sale. The true horror of this crisis for the poorest of us–homeless, for example–is almost completely unknown and unshown, and most people who do know about it don’t seem to care.
It would not surprise me if the GOP-lead Senate and the White House were deliberately making it difficult for New York to get supplies, thinking “Good, that’s the center of ‘liberal’ politics and voters, to hell with all of them.’ When does this end?
Marissa van Eck@21, The loonies on teh far right are already trying to exploit the situation by, rather literally, causing a genoicide. See poopyhead’s current [Pandemic and] Political Madness All The Time thread here at FtB. An excerpt of that excerpt (taken from As world struggles to stop deaths, far right celebrates COVID-19 (Al Jazeera edits in {curly braces})):
Timothy Wilson — who the FBI shot — and who was allegedly planning to attack a Covid-19 hospital with a (truck?) bomb, “was an administrator of a neo-Nazi Telegram channel known for encouraging violence.”