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Grady: Profit is driving the opposition to public option

Anna Grady

Published: September 28, 2009

Morganton, NC - Public option is not a government takeover of health care. Public option is simply one more choice a consumer would have.
The insurance monopoly is threatened because so many people would buy into the government plan that it would force the insurance companies to meet those lowered premiums to keep and attract customers. There's nothing wrong with making money — we are a nation based on opportunity — but the insurance companies can charge what they want, arbitrarily refuse payments and treatment to the detriment of patient health, and have absolutely no competition. At the heart of capitalism is competition. Public option would be that competition.
Sen. Max Baucus is one of the loudest opponents of public option. The official Baucus proposal released Wednesday would completely eliminate competition for insurance companies by making coverage mandatory and would penalize anyone failing to maintain coverage. Baucus believes in penalizing people already unable to buy insurance with fines ridiculously starting at $750 and forcing everyone else with current coverage to be required by law to meet whatever premiums companies set. This gives an already bloated industry a definite guaranteed bigger and continual base profit without check. But, of course, Baucus thinks this is a good idea, because the insurance companies, who have paid him $3.4 million for the last five years, said so.
Remember Jo Godfrey, the 42-year-old mother who tried desperately to find a cause for her recurrent breathing trouble? Her insurance company, the third largest in the country (Cigna) kept from her the fact she had lung cancer to avoid the cost of treatment. They only reluctantly paid after the subpoenaing of her medical records they claimed to have lost. Her records showed they knew about her lung cancer for years prior to the diagnosis from the non-Cigna doctor she paid out-of-pocket to see because she knew something was wrong with her despite what Cigna was telling her. And this is not a unique case or unique to that particular company. Everyone has a horror story or has had to deal with the terrible headache of trying to make their insurance pay out even a fraction of what you are paying in. So Cigna could have literally killed her because it was cheaper than treating her and chose profit over a person. And remember how Cigna cut 1,100 jobs in the first quarter of 2009, the same time they reported net profits of $208 million, and paid their CEO Ed Hanway $11.4 million in annual salary minus the bonuses? And that's petty cash to the $17.4 million Ron Williams of the second-largest insurance provider, Aetna, made or the staggering $29.7 million John Hammergren of the biggest company of them all, McKesson, made.
Remember that these companies shell out $1.5 million every single day to tell us that public option is socialized medicine. And to put that expenditure into perspective, that's $62,500 per hour, or roughly $20 every single second of every single minute of every single hour of every single day. With such an incredible amount of money to burn, they are certainly not your friend and the patient certainly does not come first. Profit does.
Health care is a service, not a business, and there are serious ethical and moral ramifications to viewing people as part of a mathematical profit equation. "Leave health care alone, it's fine" and "public option is socialized medicine" are lies perpetuated by an untouchable, uncontrollable, bloated monopoly and its paid politicians who do not want American capitalistic competition to threaten their profits. Profits come first.