UnitedHealth Group Talking Points Tell Employees To Oppose The Public Option

Ran it though the Google Talking Points to English translator.

UnitedHealth Group supports bipartisan, comprehensive health care modernization.

Translation: We support a plan that transfers government dollars into our pockets but preserves our status as a monopoly or oligopolist in the markets . where we do business.

* Our company is playing a constructive role in the health care modernization discussion, engaging with the Administration, Congress and industry leaders in support of sustainable reform that will slow future health care cost growth while still delivering quality medical coverage.

Our industry has been innovators in developing best practices that achieve this goal - these include efforts from far-reaching administrative reforms that slash paperwork to initiatives that reduce medical errors, all to ensure that doctors and hospitals can focus on patient care.

Translation: Rest assured that before we raised your premiums to support our bloated executive compensation and adminisrative overhead costs, we cut costs as much as we thought we could get away with.

UnitedHealth Group, in partnership with physicians, hospitals and other care providers, has developed proven initiatives that government could undertake today to slow future health care cost growth, including institutional preadmission programs to manage illnesses and prevent avoidable hospitalizations, clinical evidence-based care management tools, and rewards for physicians for providing comprehensive medical care. It is critical that sustainable health care reform be passed that will not only expand coverage and improve quality, but also will slow the growth of health care costs. Our industry's proposal for health reform brings everyone into the system, guarantees coverage for all Americans, does away with pre-existing condition limitations, and ends ratings based on health status and gender. The approximately 75,000 men and women of our company work passionately every day to help people lead healthier lives.

Translation: We are very much for any plan that transfers taxpayer money into our wallets as long as it doesn't entail even the slightest prospect of competition or is otherwise disruptive to our status as monopolists or oligopolists in every market we serve. Our terror of competition is spurring us to make half-hearted cosmetic efforts at cost containment and to be more discreet about how we crush people who get illnesses that will cost us a lot of money.

Our company is very concerned that a government-run health plan would be a road block to meaningful health care reform. It would significantly increase costs for individuals and families, would add billions of dollars in new liabilities to the federal budget, would break down the current health care system upon which more than 160 million Americans rely, and would violate the President's commitment that those who like their current coverage can keep it. We are committed to the enactment of a uniquely American approach to health care reform and bipartisan reforms that build upon what is currently working and that ensure those who like their current coverage can keep it.

Translation: We are absolutely peeing in our pants in terror at the prospect of actual competition by a company whose objective is to provide health care coverage rather than to pay bloated salaries and bonueses to its executives because our decades as a monopoly or oligopolist in every market we serve has left us bloated and sluggish and incapable of competing.

SOP for unethical businesses. I worked for a small town bank in the 1970s - Dow Chemical wanted a nuclear power plant - some folks opposed it. The bank officers handed out pro-nukes buttons and told us all to wear them. I refused, and was told, 'It's part of your job.' (I told them that was illegal, and if they wanted to fire me for refusing to wear it I would be happy to see them in court. I never wore it.)

Turns out the site was unsafe, and for once the forces of good won - the plant was never built (and Dow didn't go out of business.)

Google United Health Care fines. They're facing up to $1.3 billion in fines from the State of California.