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Posts Tagged ‘greed’

Some thoughts before the President’s big speech

September 10th, 2009
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by Jason McGill

Government: “You charge WAY too much and you treat your customers like dirt!”

Health Insurance: “Okay, let’s compromise.  I’ll treat them a little less like dirt if they agree to pay me more money.”

Government: “Awesome!  Helloooo reelection!”

It occurred to me while watching Meet the Press online that I was insane for watching Meet the Press online.   Then it occurred to me that the above dialogue basically explains what, if anything, we’re going to get out of this mess.  If you want a long (but really good and readable) explanation, you should read this article by Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi.

The President has all but said (and will say Wednesday night, I predict) that there will be no real public insurance plan, the much bally-hooed public option.  If there is a public option, the blue dog democrats have assured us that it will pay out at rates similar to private insurance (instead of lower medicare plus five rates) so that the playing field is level with insurance.  That also means the public plan would be pointless.  It’s like saying, to level the playing field, homeless shelters have to charge the same as hotels.  Whenever anyone mentions blue dog democrats, imagine a blue dog humping the leg of a health insurance CEO.

But never fear!  There is more to health insurance reform than the public option, right?  That’s the line the White House has been pushing for weeks.  They love mentioning how the bill will keep you from getting turned down for preexisting conditions, and insurance companies won’t be able to kick you off the rolls if you get sick, and they’ll cap out of pocket expenses, and they won’t be able to arbitrarily raise premiums multiple times in one year, and you might even be able to keep your insurance if you “switch jobs.”  In other words, the health insurance companies are going to have to treat people like human beings instead of bloody sacks of cash to be drained up and thrown out.

How is this real change?  Gee, you make the industry that has caused this health care crisis stop a few of it’s more egregious, blood-sucking practices.  Hooray!  A major victory!

But there’s more!  There’s also an individual mandate looming overhead, meaning everyone MUST by health insurance or face a tax penalty.  Health insurance, welcome to 47 million new customers, courtesy of uncle sam!  Forty-seven million Americans, welcome to fly-by-night health insurance, much like the craptastic state minimum car insurance advertised late at night on the CW (not that I watch it).  The only difference between that kind of insurance and no insurance is that you pay to be uninsured.

THIS is reform?  Creating a windfall for the industry that screwed things up?  Exponentially increasing the overhead and the paperwork logjam that is strangling health care?

But here’s the best part.  No denials for pre-existing conditions?  No kicking people off when they get sick?  Keeping insurance if you lose your job?  These all KEEP people on the insurance rolls.  Wow, tough reforms.  Really sticking it to the people that stuck it to us.  Insurance companies will get to pass these costs on to the public via the mandate, or subsidies from tax money that will support the mandate.  No wonder PhRMA, the drug lobby, is spending 140 million to SUPPORT reform.  They took a lesson from Wall Street about socializing losses and privatizing gains.

It’s a win, win, win all around for insurance, and lose lose for Americans.  We’ll pay more and get less.  And the added bonus?  This plan can properly be called “Universal Health Care,” forever sullying the name of the only system that makes sense, and the system every other industrialized country in the world has, and the system that veterans, the elderly, and the very poor have right now, single payer.

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Blame conservatives!

April 6th, 2009
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Brian Michaelson

Contributor

Some days you just can’t be disgusted enough. Other days, you just shake your head and realize that Republicans are either too smart for their own good—or too dense. If history will be a lesson, you’d think after the first two economic debacles they created, they’d learn their lessons and not repeat it. But then again, Americans can be, well, even more dense.

The GOP has been squawking at every level about “socialism” and “big government” since the Obama Administration took office. Funny. If we look at the trend over the last 8 months, the former Bush Administration took more “socialistic liberties” with companies like AIG, Goldman-Sachs, CitiBank, J.P. Morgan-Chase, and a few other mega-corporations who are now reaping the greedy benefits of taxpayer-funded welfare. Ironically, after Obama decided to do the right thing and go after AIG’s “contractually obligated bonuses”, it became apparent that paying off these CEOs who drove their companies into the ground at taxpayer expense was “necessary”. Who believes this crap?

What parts of history don’t people remember when this stuff keeps coming around? If anyone wants a classic case of conservative economic principles gone wrong, I’ll provide you with three.

First off, the Savings & Loan collapse of the 1980s. Anyone recall the Keating Five? Charles Keating, among others (including GOP head-man John McCain), essentially collapsed the largest Saving & Loan business on the continent at their own personal gain, all because of looser regulation, and less oversight from our taxpayer-guarding friends at the SEC and FTC. Keating took the rap and went to prison for it, but had justice truly been done, McCain never would’ve ran for President. Ever. What became of all this? Even less regulation (does that make sense at all?).

Second, pre-FDR era. Need I really say more? Of course, most people don’t realize that FDR cleaned up the massive pile of dung left by his Republican predecessors Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover. Hoover alone drove up inflation and unemployment so high, that we’re likely to never see levels that bad ever again. Al because J.P. Morgan and his Rockefeller buddies wanted less government insight into their monopolistic practices. Roosevelt, a Democrat, invested government money into federally sponsored jobs (thank FDR for the Golden Gate Bridge, the Hoover Dam, and thousands of other WPA works), nationalized defunct banks and loan business (literally hundreds of them), tightened regulation on almost everything, and eventually never lived to see the fruits of his administration’s labors.

Third, and best of all, the post-9/11 Bush Administration’s removal of virtually every bank regulation in existence. What Clinton had attempted to shore up in the 90’s (back when we actually had a balanced budget and a robust economy not riding on a weak dollar), Bush essentially removed them all, at the behest of his buds in businesses like Enron (Ken Lay anyone?). Lo and behold, an artificially inflated economy riding on the coattails of bad economics has crashed so hard, we couldn’t have caught it if we wanted to. Simply because the fix to the problem of a slowing economy was—you guessed it—less regulation.

The lesson behind all this? Conservative economics and politics simply don’t work. They never have, and never will. Conservatives want unchecked capitalism, but if we can all learn from history, unchecked capitalism simply leads to unchecked greed.

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