Profiting off pain hurts -- Wall Street tells CIGNA it's pissed we're not hurting enough
Greetings,
I am so glad I found Wendell Potter. If you can’t figure out how it is that your health insurance premiums keep going up while the services you get for that cost is in the toilet and flushing, I urge you to subscribe to his newsletter. The stunningly lazy media will not explain it to you, but he will.
Wendell is a former insurance executive who has gone rogue and is exposing all the ways he once used to craft messaging to make us think the insurance industry wasn’t really just a sophisticated slave master where it is our minds and bodies that are the products bought and sold to Wall Street.
All that schmancy bullshit from CIGNA marketeers telling us how CIGNA has our best interests at heart is irrational and utterly impossible if what they must do to stay in business is ensure we can’t afford what we pay for. Yet, they all the while tell us that buying their “product”, ie, health coverage, will keep us from being destroyed financially when we get sick.
Profits from our pain
This is why if you actually think for one minute about our healthcare system, it causes cognitive dissonance.
This also explains why healthcare in this country will never get fixed. This is on purpose. There has never actually been a real attempt at healthcare reform, since the mid1980’s when it was reformed in favor of investors through the beginning of privatization. Not even the authors of so-called Obamacare could bring themselves to tell us the truth. All they did was re-arrange the cash flow streams.
The truth is this: the premise of our system itself is antithetical to what we actually need it for. The only thing the health insurance industry exists to do is profit from our pain. That’s it. No other arguments are sincere.
Most members of Congress are either too ignorant (likely) or too beholden to see and understand this.
Below is another great post from Wendell that helps makes what is actually pretty shifty shell-game economics used by our nation’s pharma-insurance cartel disguised as our healthcare system easy to understand.
Libertarian nonsense
And my two cents on it is this: after 40 years of Koch Brothers-inspired libertarian bullshit nonsense, we have come largely to believe the messaging that big government is bad. No. That is a half-truth. BIG anything is bad. And guess what is TOO BIG now? Monopolies that own our bodies and are now being punished by the most elite Wall Street investors for not making us too expensive for us to buy coverage of our bodies back. We’re not talking about the Wall Street you think you participate in with your 401K, but the institutional investment banks and private equity funds that virtually buy and sell most of what gets traded on the Street.
By suppressing any urge in Congress to ensure anti-trust laws were enforced properly, the neoliberal-libertarians posing as patriots have created a deregulated environment where our healthcare companies have had no choice but to either buy up all their competitors or participate in the kinds of shareholder buy-back schemes Wendell outlines below. Instead of innovating a range of coverage plans that actually keep us from being sick AND poor, they focus only on cutting cost margins and elevating their profits to avoid the wrath of Wall Street.
Since there are virtually no more insurers left on the market to buy, instead of Big Government bureaucratic blobs managing our welfare, it’s Big and Bloated Business. It’s virtually impossible to call up CIGNA’s CEO and say WTF?, unless you are a mega-billionaire. That’s what the libertarians who make it all sound so laissez-faire lovely don’t tell you: BIG without a mechanism to dismantle it is authoritarianism. Also, in our case, a plutocracy.
If insurance had not become such big, bloated blob in the first place, there’d be more insurance providers in the marketplace, the markets would actually respond to us by there being a range of companies offering a range of products we could choose from according to our needs, not Goldman’s, and CIGNA would not now be taking a bloodbath. That’s a bath in our blood, btw.
This dog don’t hunt
Meaningful change to this system will never happen while the current dinosaurs we have in Congress remain, but one thing you can at least do is take some time to understand this is actually why healthcare is so expensive and predatory. If you are retired and don’t “have to care” because Medicare is your provider now…guess what…your data is the hot product for these companies now as they stalk you for their Medicare Advantage plans.
Then, the next time an elected official or wannabe barks at you with how free markets is the American way, you can sit that puppy down with some training on how that might be the way we were taught Capitalism was supposed to work, where the market determined the players, but it is long gone and was disappeared on purpose with Congress’s help. If they can’t understand that, then I reckon they can’t be trusted to guard the House or the Senate.