Senate Passes Landmark Health Care Bill

Cawleybo answers you here:

They are posturing so that when HC gets MORE expensive and people get upset at having to overpay private companies for insurance that doesn't really cover them, republicans can say, "See, we told you."

This may look familiar because its the exact same playbook they followed with the Stimulus. Force the democrats to negotiate with themselves until they pass a piece of crap that won't do the job. Then hold it up as an example stimulus not working.

The howling and gnashing and posturing from the Republicans and their friends in Big Pharma and Big Insurance has of course also served to push the bill even further to the right, at the hands of the Democrats who are also great friends of Big Pharma and Big Insurance. So it's a win-win-win-win. The howling and gnashing will continue as long as there's any opportunity to get further concessions for pharma and insurance, and any opportunity for additional rents from the taxpayers.

Oh, and of course an insurance industry insider answered you as well a couple of weeks ago:

We WIN. Administered by private insurance companies. No government funding. No government insurance competitor.

And of course the Wall Street investors are answering you as well -- they're lovin' themselves some health insurance stocks right now, where they've hit 52-week highs and are continuing to significantly outperform the S&P 500, with their prices closely tracking activity in Congress -- or more precisely, how that Congressional activity is projected to affect the "industry's" profits. (I put "industry" in scare quotes because they don't, you know, make stuff; they profit from being middlemen and from denying care. Good work if you can get it.)

As Reuters noted (h/t Shahien Nasiripour at HuffPo):

"All in all, relative to the last version of health reform issued by the Senate, things have turned out pretty well for the health insurance industry," said Carl McDonald, an analyst at Oppenheimer. "In particular, all versions of a government-run health plan have largely been eliminated."

www dot huffingtonpost dot com slash 2009 slash 12 slash 21 slash seeing-public-subsidy-not_n_399733.html

Nasiripour describes it further:

Investors are seeing the Senate's version of health care reform as a massive public subsidy for insurance companies -- and as a result, are sending the sector's stock prices shooting up, up, up. Stripped of a government-run insurance plan, the bill would give tens of millions of Americans no option but to start paying hefty premiums to private companies.

The rise in stock prices has been particularly striking in the period since Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) said on October 27 that he would filibuster a Senate health care reform bill if it included a public option - a threat that caused Senate leaders to cave without much of a fight.

Here's a quick breakdown of major health insurance company stock performance from Oct. 27 to Friday's market close:

* Coventry Health Care, Inc. is up 31.6 percent;

* CIGNA Corp. is up 29.1 percent;

* Aetna Inc. is up 27.1 percent;

* WellPoint, Inc. is up 26.6 percent;

* UnitedHealth Group Inc. is up 20.5 percent;

* And Humana Inc. is up 13.6 percent.

By comparsion, the Dow Jones Industrial Average is only up 2.3 percent during that time; the NASDAQ Composite is up a (relatively) paltry 1.4 percent.

The OpEdNews story linked above provides more of a blow-by-blow breakdown of the stock moves at various points in the machinations of the sausage factory.

This bill was largely written by and for the insurance industry. In part, they're doing the Br'er Rabbit cry right now. It's been the job of Big Insurance and Big PhRMA, together with the Republicans, to howl against this "socialist" bill, even after the WH bought them off with backroom deals. You know, this horrible, socialist bill that hands the private health insurers 30 million new customers, mandated by federal law, with no significant controls on how much they can charge these new customers (or their old customers) in premiums. The bill that continues to prohibit reimportation of drugs from Europe and Canada (which, oddly enough, was also part of the Obama campaign platform and something Obama voted for when he was in the US Senate.) You know, that bill. The bill that amounts to a massive wealth and income transfer from American workers to the health insurance and PhRMA giants -- whether directly through mandated premium payments, or indirectly through tax-financed subsidies. (If the numbers turn out to be wrong and the subsidies need to be deficit-financed, that's yet another wealth transfer: from US taxpayers to the holders of US government debt.) This wealth transfer, of course, only strengthens this parasitic "industry" and makes them even more able to resist change the next time round.

That's how the game is played, folks (for those who know how to play it, which includes AHIP, PhRMA, the WH, and one political party in Congress, although seemingly not the majority party).

You're looking for things to complain about.

A typical reductio ad NCStevium.

Tell me, Mr. NCStrawman, what is Medicare's overhead? What is the overhead of the private insurers'? What is the difference between them, multiplied out over the size of the health care sector (or the relevant portion of it)? What else could we be doing with that money other than lining executives' pockets and paying for expensive Caribbean junkets for health insurer managers?

Nobody -- NOBODY -- said govt health care overhead is, was, or would be, zero. Nobody -- NOBODY -- ever said that govt-provided stuff is free. You are just makin' that shit up. It's another example of your constant use of Propaganda Rule #47: when you've got no rational arguments, pathologize the opposition.

All of which proves that you actually have no point.