PHIMG Coalition - Grassroot voices demanding Medicare For All!

The insurer, Health Insurance Plan of New York, sent its top officers home with hefty paychecks that included millions of dollars in bonuses, according to documents filed this week with the state’s Insurance Department. According to department officials, HIP’s president and chief executive officer, Anthony Watson, earned $4.79 million in 2007, up from $2.14 million in 2006. The company’s chief operating officer, Daniel McGowan, who resigned this month, was paid $2.46 million, an increase from $1.14 million.

Others who received pay increases included HIP’s chief financial officer and general counsel, Michael Fullwood, who earned $1.99 million in 2007, up from $896,000 in 2006. Insurance officials said the company’s chief information officer, John Steber, earned $1.5 million in 2007 compared to $763,000 in 2006.

Executives received the windfall just as HIP and an affiliate, Group Health Insurance, are pursuing plans to merge and convert into a for-profit corporation. Last year, the parent company for the health plans, EmblemHealth, which accounts for the vast majority of policies held by city employees, filed a plan describing their intentions with the state Insurance Department, which must approve the change.

Last night, state insurance officials were critical of the pay hike for executives and indicated the boost in compensation might have an impact on the agency’s decision about the future of the companies.

“We are very concerned about HIP’s announcement that it has doubled the salaries of its top 10 executives at a time when the company has not been performing well,” a spokesman for the department, David Neustadt, wrote in an e-mail message. “As we consider its pending merger with GHI and conversion to a stock company, we will be asking the executives tough questions about this decision.”

FYI -- $4.79 million is enough to provide healthcare for twelve months to nearly 1,400 people (at $3,500 each).

TO: C-SPAN Washington Journal
DATE: 4/19/2008
SUBJECT: Single-Payer Healthcare is THE Solution!

You've had at least one expert on your show declaring that nobody talked about national single-payer healthcare. That is wrong and stupid. I've attended, or watched online videos of, hearings or conventions where the vast majority of people spoke about single-payer. In fact, this was true every time.

The media and politicians have tried to bury the whole issue of single-payer, because they are in the pay of insurance companies. Single-payer is going to win out, regardless of what they do, because the U. S., which is supposed to be so far ahead in everything, is conspicuously backward in healthcare, and it hurts millions of people because of it. As long as insurance companies are in the picture, they will maximize profits by minimizing care. There is no point in trying to regulate or "work with" them; they are in the business to make money, and they will do this any way they can. They spend billions looking for ways to deny care, so that they can make many billions more. Every single person who has been stiffed by an insurance company has the right to sue, but not everyone can. Most people will have died of the diseases for which they have been denied care, before their cases finish wending their way through the courts. To keep insurance companies in the picture is to condemn millions of people to lives of suffering.

It's not a question of whether or not we will ever get single-payer; it's a question of when. How long do you want it to take?

Sincerely,

Carol F. Yost

New York City

You don't need to be an economist to understand that any middleman interposed between seller and buyer raises the price of a given service or product. Some intermediaries justify this by providing benefits, such as salesmanship, advertising or transport. Others offer physical facilities, such as warehouses. A third group, organized crime, utilizes fear and intimidation to muscle its way into the provider-consumer chain, raking in hefty profits and bloating cost, without providing any benefit at all.

The health insurance model is closest to the parasitic relationship imposed by the Mafia and the like. Insurance companies provide nothing other than an ambiguous, shifty notion of "protection." But even the Mafia doesn't stick its nose into the process; once the monthly skim is set, Don Whoever stays out of the picture, but for occasional "cost of doing business" increases. When insurance companies insinuate themselves into the system, their first step is figuring out how to increase the skim by harming the people they are allegedly protecting through reduced service.

Insurance is all about betting against negative consequences and the insurance business model is unique in that profits depend upon goods and services not being provided. Using actuarial tables, insurers place their bets. Sometimes even the canniest MIT grads can't help: Property and casualty insurers have collapsed in the wake of natural disasters.

Health insurers have taken steps to avoid that level of surprise: Once they affix themselves to the host – in this case dual hosts, both doctor and patient – they systematically suck the lifeblood out of the supply chain with obstructive strategies. For that reason, the consequences of any insurance-based health-care model, be it privately run, or a government entitlement, are painfully easily to predict. There will be progressively draconian rationing using denial of authorization and steadily rising co-payments on the patient end; massive paperwork and other bureaucratic hurdles, and steadily diminishing fee-recovery on the doctor end.

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Physicians and other providers need to liberate themselves from the Faustian bargain they've cut with the Mephistophelian suits who now run their professional lives. Because many doctors are loath to talk about money, they allowed themselves to perpetuate the fantasy that "insurance is paying." It isn't. There is no free lunch and no free physical exam.

If substantial numbers of health-care providers shook off the insurance monkey on their back, en masse, and the supply of providers was substantially increased by opening more medical schools, the result would be a more honest, cost-effective system benefiting everyone. Except the insurance companies.