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Rendell's Un-Healthy Insurance Scheme
by
Watchdog | 01.14.2008
Once it is remembered that Big Insurance is the biggest investment bloc on Wall Street...and that customer's supposed Health Care money may be thereby invested in even the industries that caused one's disease, a lot becomes clear. Rendell works for Wall Street, not public health. The Pittsburgh Post Gazette had an overview of what is so far known about Rendell's plan for the state. http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/07018/754792-85.stm Though the REST of the plan won't be revealed til later, it's clear that this is a huge giveaway of public money (through the state and through compulsory patronage by individuals) to private insurers...insurers who caused and still cause the U.S. health care atrocity. That article lists things that Rendell's plan will do; * It won't require participating insurers to reveal any investment or insurance conflicts they may have with health-damaging industries. It ignores the public's Right To Know. * It won't require insurers to up-front reveal any investment links with businesses that many may not care to associate with in any context for religious, moral, political, environmental or business reasons. * It won't require insurers that are, or have been, part owners of cigarette firms to pay a cent in liabilities, penalties or damages. They may keep their profits. * It won't forbid private insurers from using the public's health care money for advertising, lobbying, candidate funding, corporate jets, CEO bonuses, corporate conventions, or even lawn care and furniture polish at corporate headquarters. People will be forced, by state law, to contribute to all that. It ignores that there is absolutely NO Public Interest served in compelling public funding of such things. * Though supposedly in the Public Interest, many aspects will not be paid by the public but will be Unfunded Mandates on specific entities such as hospitals and doctors and so forth. The plan does not forbid the passing along of those costs to patients or others. Or can hospitals, et al, deduct the expenses from taxes thus further depleting the pool of public funds for social services? * Despite unimaginable, inevitable harms from many non-tobacco cigarette adulterants (pesticides, radiation, chlorine/dioxin, burn accelerants, etc.), and despite many of those harms being impossible to be caused by smoke from tobacco itself (or any plant), new punitive "sin" taxes on unwitting, insufficiently-warned, deceived, unprotected, secretly-poisoned victims of secret cigarette components will be enacted to help fund the program...a program, remember, that greatly benefits OWNERS (the investor insurers) of multi-million dollar cigarette holdings. The plan ignores that the perpetrators will be therefore paid, again, by their own victims. * It does not consider the added cost to the state and municipalities from cigarette smuggling, theft, and black marketing...all inevitable effects of prohibitive taxation on such products. * It won't forbid participating insurers from having conflicts of interest with pharmaceutical investments even though such an insurer may promote its own investment property's drugs over others that may be more effective, less expensive, or safer. * It won't require INDEPENDENT medical research to assure that unsafe drugs are detected, that patients are properly diagnosed for exposures to industrial toxins/carcinogens or other industrial harms, and that "alternative" natural unpatented medicines are not fraudulently disparaged for the sake of insurer profits via it's synthetic pharm/petrochem holdings. * It ignores questions about the Constitutional legality of compelling individuals to speak to private insurers with both words and money. * And it ignores the enormously cheaper, more efficient, conflict-free, and safer option of a public-funded, public-administered Single Payer health system.
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