The Political Voices of Women

This is from a post at Fact-esque on the healthcare crisis…

Health insurance corporations have been, next to energy and pharmaceutical corpo’s, enjoying the highest profits of any economic sector. Now that the Bush Recession is beginning to affect the middle class and not just us low-incomers, it’s getting harder to maintain those profits as more companies jettison their health programs and more people are making less money. In a “free market”, of course, this would mean that health insurance premiums would go down. Are they? Well, um, no, actually.

The economic slowdown has swelled the ranks of people without health insurance. But now it is also threatening millions of people who have insurance but find that the coverage is too limited or that they cannot afford their own share of medical costs.

. . . (more)

We’re looking at millions more uninsured than we’ve seen up to now simply because with their income doing a vanishing act, nobody can afford health insurance any more. It’s hard to figure the health corpo’s rationale.

Mr. Corbin said that under their employer’s health plan, he and his co-workers are now obliged to pay up to $4,000 of their families’ annual medical bills, on top of about $1,600 a year in premiums. Five years ago, they paid no premiums and were responsible for only about $2,000 of their families’ medical bills.

“That’s a big jump,” Mr. Corbin said. “You’ve just lost a month’s pay.”

. . . (more)

The results have been painful. Health insurance corpo’s looking for higher and higher profits without bothering to look at the overall economic picture are bankrupting their customers and offering less and less in return.

Experts say that too often for the underinsured, coverage can seem like health insurance in name only — adequate only as long as they have no medical problems.

“There’s a real shift in the burden of health care to people who happen to be sick,” said Paul B. Ginsburg, the president of the Center for Studying Health System Change, a research group in Washington.

And here, at last, we begin to see what the insurance companies laughingly call “a strategy”: now they want people who are sick because those people will pay whatever they have to pay as long it’s below the amount they would be paying without insurance. This is a whole new area of profit-taking. Instead of charging everybody 10% of their medication cost, you charge just the sick - what? 80%? 70%? What will the traffic bear?

That’s the motto of health insurers today, apparently: “As much as you can get away with.”

These are just excerpts, I recommend that you read the whole post at Fact-esque.

ALSO SEE:

Even The Insured Will Soon Be Paying Much More

Would You Be Covered Under the McCain Health Care Plan?

Health Care For All (except the sick)

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