Never Surrender

For the United States, WWII ended on August 14, 1945 when the Japanese announced their surrender. For Japanese Imperial Army Captain Fumio Nakahira, WWII ended when he was discovered in April, 1980 on Mount Halcon, which is on Mindoro Island in the Philippines.

I think it is a good time to reflect on this man's accomplishment. While many may deride the good Captain Nakahira as just being a dumbass soldier who refused to surrender, I have a different take on it. I consider this man a military hero of the first order. He took an oath to defend his homeland to the death and he did his best to carry out his mission.

Captain Nakahira is a man of incredible determination and fortitude, living off the land for thirty five years. Uh, how many public school educated, lazy assed Americans could match this feat? How many Americans today have any national pride or love of country?

While I'm not upset to see the Democrats imploding, their complete lack of guts on the public option of health care reform is downright sickening. The fact that so few Republicans support that option is utterly disgusting. The health care debate has shown all of us that America's days ARE numbered.

What happened to an educated electorate? Americans who have some sense of national pride and accomplishment? Public officials who do not needlessly send our soldiers to die in some third world sh*thole?----oops, that one hit a bit close to home. Where have all the American Captain Nakahiras gone? They've gone down the crapper, that's where.

We might as well rename the country the United States of morons, lazy asses and gutless wonders. A few of us (on both sides of the aisle) realize what is at stake, but it will take more than a few to solve the problem...........if it can even be solved.

So, do we at least try to support common sense legislation or do we just roll over and take it? I think the Dems have given us the answer (Republican support would be nice, but you Dems have the votes, just twist the arms), but I suppose it is not too late for one last push.

With liberty and healthcare for all.

Mass. healthcare reform is failing us
By Susanne L. King March 2, 2009

MASSACHUSETTS HAS been lauded for its healthcare reform, but the program is a failure. Created solely to achieve universal insurance coverage, the plan does not even begin to address the other essential components of a successful healthcare system.

What would such a system provide? The prestigious Institute of Medicine, part of the National Academy of Sciences, has defined five criteria for healthcare reform. Coverage should be: universal, not tied to a job, affordable for individuals and families, affordable for society, and it should provide access to high-quality care for everyone.

The state's plan flunks on all counts.

First, it has not achieved universal healthcare, although the reform has been a boon to the private insurance industry. The state has more than 200,000 without coverage, and the count can only go up with rising unemployment.

Second, the reform does not address the problem of insurance being connected to jobs. For individuals, this means their insurance is not continuous if they change or lose jobs. For employers, especially small businesses, health insurance is an expense they can ill afford.

Third, the program is not affordable for many individuals and families. For middle-income people not qualifying for state-subsidized health insurance, costs are too high for even skimpy coverage. For an individual earning $31,213, the cheapest plan can cost $9,872 in premiums and out-of-pocket payments. Low-income residents, previously eligible for free care, have insurance policies requiring unaffordable copayments for office visits and medications.

Fourth, the costs of the reform for the state have been formidable. Spending for the Commonwealth Care subsidized program has doubled, from $630 million in 2007 to an estimated $1.3 billion for 2009, which is not sustainable.

Fifth, reform does not assure access to care. High-deductible plans that have additional out-of-pocket expenses can result in many people not using their insurance when they are sick. In my practice of child and adolescent psychiatry, a parent told me last week that she had a decrease in her job hours, could not afford the $30 copayment for treatment sessions for her adolescent, and decided to meet much less frequently.

In another case, a divorced mother stopped treatment for her son because the father had changed insurance, leaving them with an unaffordable deductible. And at Cambridge Health Alliance, doctors and nurses have cared for patients who, unable to afford the new copayments, were forced to interrupt care for HIV and even cancers that could be treated with chemotherapy.

Access to care is also affected by the uneven distribution of healthcare dollars between primary and specialty care, and between community hospitals and tertiary care hospitals. Partners HealthCare, which includes two major tertiary care hospitals in Boston, was able to negotiate a secret agreement with Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts to be paid 30 percent more for their services than other providers in the state, contributing to an increase in healthcare costs for Massachusetts, which are already the highest per person in the world. Agreements that tilt spending toward tertiary care threaten the viability of community hospitals and health centers that provide a safety net for the uninsured and underinsured.

There is, though, one US model of healthcare that meets the Institute of Medicine criteria: Medicare. Insuring everyone over 65, Medicare achieves universal coverage and access to care, is not tied to a job, and is affordable for individuals and the country. Medicare simplifies the administration of healthcare dollars, thereby saving money. We need to improve Medicare, and expand this program to include everyone.

A bill before Congress, the United States National Health Insurance Act, would provide more comprehensive coverage for all. The bill includes doctor, hospital, long-term, mental health, dental, and vision care, prescription drugs, and medical supplies, with no premiums, copayments, or deductibles.

People would be free to choose doctors and hospitals, and insurance would not be tied to a job. Costs would be controlled because health planning in a national health program can reestablish needed balance between primary/preventive care and high-tech tertiary care. A modest, progressive tax would replace what people currently pay out of pocket. This program would pay for itself by eliminating the wasteful administrative costs and profits of private insurance companies, and save $8 billion to $10 billion in Massachusetts alone.

We must let Congress know we want improved access to affordable healthcare for all, not more expensive private health insurance we can't afford to use when we are sick. Massachusetts healthcare reform fails on all five Institute of Medicine criteria. Congress should not make it a model for the nation.

Susanne L. King, M.D., practices in Berkshire County.

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OK, enough is enough. While the business of America is business, the health insurance companies are now pricing themselves out of business. Fewer and fewer companies can afford to supply health coverage.

When I started in retail even the cashiers got health insurance. Today, only the store manager usually gets full boat coverage included as a perk. Most department managers have their coverage partially subsidized and the rest of the employees have to pay the total (and totally unaffordable) premium.

Many of my conservative bretheren rightly worry about single payer health coverage, citing the obvious fact that the government screws up everything it tries to manage. Attempting to adopt the Massachusets model nationally would fail, as the above article states.

Affordable health coverage for all is not rocket science though. Doing nothing about health care reform will allow the ever greedy, but stupid, health insurance companies to simply end up offering coverage that will be affordable to only the top ten percent of the population---who knows, maybe that is the master plan to limit population growth? Just let the poor peons die.

Things do not have to be that way though. Dr. King favors some type of modified Medicare. I think she is on the right track. For proifit healthcare insurance companies should all be converted to non-profit corporations. Executive salaries should be limited and we should have mandatory tort reform. One part of the high cost of medicine is dealing with all the paperwork of thousands of different insurance companies. Simplify the paperwork by having a national health insurance policy standard where all policies issued must be identical in coverage with no exclusions for pre existing conditions.

I might even go so far as to suggest making Anthem the only health care company and make it a quasi governmental agency. Keep Medicare and expand it to include those who otherwise cannot afford health insurance.

Other people have other equally good suggestions, but as far as health insurance, the private sector for profit companies have got to go. Too bad the Dems lack the balls to ram through universal health care. Once you have it, then you can tweak it. If you never have the option, then the whole system will tank if things continue as they are.

Pelosi: Throwing Insurance Companies Under The Bus. Why?

Here is the latest gem from U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Nanci Pelosi, via Reuters: "U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Thursday ramped up her criticism of insurance companies, accusing them of unethical behavior and working to kill a plan to create a new government-run health plan."

"It's almost immoral what they are doing," Pelosi said to reporters, referring to insurance companies. "Of course they've been immoral all along in how they have treated the people that they insure," she said, adding, "They are the villains. They have been part of the problem in a major way. They are doing everything in their power to stop a public option from happening."

Hmmmmmmmmmm, so, what is up with that? We all know the Donkeys and Elephants get big contributions from big business, but why is Pelosi biting the hand that feeds her?

We may have the answer:(from dailyfinance.com link:http://www.dailyfinance.com/2009/07/31/after-182-billion-taxpayer-rescue-is-aig-on-the-verge-of-colla/) Is AIG on the verge of Collapse? You may remember American International Group (AIG). The U.S. government gave it $182 billion of taxpayer money last fall in exchange for a 78 percent stake. Of that money, $165 million went for bonuses to a handful of people in its Financial Products Group (FPG), which sold Credit Default Swaps (CDSs) on which AIG lacked the capital to make good. And $200 million more is slated for those good folks in 2009.

Another $12.9 billion of our taxpayer money went to Goldman Sachs Group (GS) so AIG could pay Goldman 100 cents on the dollar for its CDSs. Hank Paulson wanted to keep the names of Goldman and the other recipients secret -- since so many of them were foreign banks, but the information leaked out in March 2009 after Paulson left office.

Now, thanks to some solid reporting in The New York Times, it looks like the rot at AIG is not limited to FPG. While AIG officials have claimed that its problems were isolated to FPG, the reality is that AIG seems to have been running something akin to a shell game of massive proportions. Its shell game version took the form of selling insurance and assigning the resultant risks among its 71 different North American insurance companies.

Thanks to AIG's regulatory arbitrage -- taking advantage of the fact that its 19 state insurance regulators never conduct examinations at the same time -- AIG may have been able to shift assets among the companies to fool state regulators. If one its companies did not have enough money set aside as reserves against future claims, AIG could move assets to that reserve-deficient company right before the state insurance examiner moved in. And once that examiner was gone, AIG could in theory shift the extra cash to the next reserves-deficient company.

Want an example? Consider AIG affiliate National Union (NU). AIG indicated to Pennsylvania state insurance investigators that it had $33.7 billion in assets at the end of 2008 -- more than enough to protect against $21.9 billion in liabilities. But what the Pennsylvania regulators did not see is that $10.9 billion worth of NU's assets were investments in other AIG affiliates, which are not publicly traded and whose value is hard to measure. Subtract that and you have only $22.8 billion in assets.

But wait -- there's more. NU had $42 billion more in liabilities that the Pennsylvania regulators missed. How so? NU had obligations to pay claims of other AIG insurance affiliates -- the biggest of which was $23.1 billion that it owed AIG affiliate American Home (AH). NU owed another $19 billion to several other AIG afiiliates.

Meanwhile, AH had crushing obligations of its own. While the New York state regulators thought it had $26.3 billion in assets to a mere $19.9 billion in liabilities, the reality was far more dire. How so? AH was on the hook for an additional $120.7 billion in guarantees to 16 other AIG affiliates. Thus AH's liabilities really exceeded its assets by $114 billion.

To summarize, AIG's core insurance companies seem to be like a shell game which AIG was able to continue operating because it was able to keep the cash moving from the affiliate that one state regulator had just examined to the one that another state regulator was about to examine.

Unfortunately, it would not surprise me if this was happening and continues to happen at all big U.S. insurance companies. Moreover, I would be shocked if former AIG CEO Hank Greenberg -- who has heaped scorn on his successors -- was unaware of this practice. (Peter Cohan wrote this article)
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The Democrats could have a serious problem since it now looks like AIG was just another giant shell game. The only way the Dems can get out of this is with a quiet bailout, again, of AIG. I think the cat is out of the bag though and Pelosi is distancing herself while getting ready for the new catastrophe of an AIG failure.

You do have to hand it to those AIG boys though. Run a huge multi-billion dollar scam, get the federal government to give you 182 billion, use 165 million of that for bonuses to executives "too valuable to lose" and now you may get even more money. Crime does pay.

I think you will find this is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to insurance company scams and incompetence. I overheard a conversation the other day between two long term care insurance company execs. One mentioned that they had badly underestimated how many of their policyholders would be in need of long term care and that they needed to kick up their premiums by 40% or in a few years they would be out of money. Long term care is yet another healthcare issue that we will need to deal with.

Pelosi and the Dems could be in major trouble if AIG tanks, and it looks like some really bad things are going on there.