My Most Recent Experience With The Predatory Health Care Bureaucracy

My next major post is going to be the Buffett investment in IBM that I have been promising for the last six months.   But while waiting on the corporate Supreme Court's decision on ObamaCare, I thought I would share my most recent experience with my health insurance company.    My premium increased 35% over my last quarterly bill.  No heads up or anything.   Not the first time that has happened.  My rates have gone up over 30% a year or so for at least the last six years. 

When I called my agent, she shared with me that my risk profile is “super low”.  ie, I am considered a great client, or should I say easy prey, because of my health and lifestyle.   That means I am fortunate enough to get some of the best insurance rates.    So, with this premium increase I changed my policy to the highest deductible allowable by law.  This is the third time I have done so in the last six years.  So, I guesstimate that were my deductible to have remained the same over that period of time, my policy would have increased about 600%.   Even with my many deductible increases it has still increased 250%.   I can’t even imagine what my increases would have been were I considered high risk.   Those people are the victims of state-backed corporate predation.  I would guess from talking to a few people who are high risk that my policy would have gone up about 1000% over the last six years.  By the way, for someone who is self-insured, this is the rule not the exception. 

I just want to wish Obama all the luck in the world collecting those mandatory health insurance premiums that are part of his legislation.   He’ll need it.  The moment I can actually ditch my insurance plan and become an indigent ward of the state under ObamaCare, I plan to do just that rather than participate in a corrupt, for-profit, predatory corporate health insurance racket enforced by the corporate state.

My agent, who is essentially a telesales employee working in a call center, making some marginally livable or unlivable wage because we are all enslaved to our corporate masters, told me that if she changed my plan to a higher deductible, I would no longer be grandfathered into ObamaCare.  That meant any new changes would impact me differently.  Hahaha.  I remarked to her that nefarious, nondescript statement sounded like canned propaganda direct from the marketing department.  A statement with an intent to instill fear into people seeking to lower their policy rates with higher deductibles.  A change that would cut into the hundreds of millions of dollars health care CEOs stuff into their pockets courtesy of poor sonofabitches like me.  When I asked what exactly it meant that I wouldn't be grandfathered into ObamaCare, and why I should pay a higher rate to “be grandfathered”, she couldn’t actually quantify how grandfathering benefited me.  Ahem.  In other words, some health insurance executive milking policyholders stuck this line of bulloney in front of all of their agents to read to policyholders to legally scare them into keeping their rates as high as possible.  It’s most likely nothing more than terrorizing people with fear, uncertainty and doubt in order to keep them paying higher rates and greater corporate serfdom. 

This whole fiasco really has nothing to do with ObamaCare.  As much as it is a horrible piece of legislation creating an entirely new bloated bureaucracy in Washington, the predatory health care machine was fully greased before he ever took office.  All Obama did was simply codify the force of the state in mandating for-profit corporate health insurance.  He is simply appeasing the predators.   Appeasing evil. 

The people who cheered when Obama's health care plan was passed were cheering because their "team" had won.  And, given they thoughtlessly support the ideology of their "team", that win must be worth cheering.   No one who reads this legislation, other than a health care bureaucrat, would cheer anything.  But loyalty to the party at the expense of reason, intellectual analysis and truth;  that's what our society has become in the dumbed-down corporate state.  So, we cheer our political teams onward to embrace greater corporate tyranny and injustice. 

Anyone who believes that Obama's smarmy health care plan, negotiated in complete secrecy under the duress of unprecedented lobbyist bribery, is a "starting point" for reforming health care is deluding themselves.   This is a massively corrupt, fascist (comingling of corporations and government) plan that isn't a starting point for anything but greater for-profit corporate serfdom and tyranny.  Medicare and Social Security as starting points didn't prey upon people nor line for-profit corporate coffers using the force of the state.  This plan is a sellout of democracy to the corporate state.

As I have noted numerous times, rather than a 2,500 page monstrosity of complexity and bloat that creates an entirely new corporate-led, state-enforced bureaucracy, we could have had a ten page addendum to a reasonably efficient public bureaucracy that already serves society reasonably well; Medicare.  That is, other than corporations who game the system and steal tens if not hundreds of billions through Medicare fraud.   Medicare is far from perfect and there are most certainly better solutions but it does work.   And, if everyone is using it, it will get better over time. 

Obama could have made Medicare available to all Americans at cost and the bill could have been so simple, I could have written it.   But that would have left his corporate masters with no piece of the health insurance serfdom profit pie.  Anyone who cannot afford Medicare could be given access at no charge and a tax levied on the richest Americans to pay for it since they are the ones bribing our government and setting policy in the first place.  Maybe if they had to pay for the poverty they created, they'd quit lobbying government to create it. 

At the same time, a plan could have been put in place to start transferring the health care plans of Congress and government workers into a single-payer, non-profit, public Medicare system.   Politicians, as public servants, should be forced to eat their own cooking.   They should be forced to use Medicare or what other Obamination of health care they force upon the rest of us.