Health Insurers: the OTHER U.S. Oligarchs

As the Obama regime goes through the motions of its health-care non-reform, new numbers released in the U.S. media show what the main problem is in the U.S. health-care system – along with demonstrating that nothing is being done to fix the problem.

An article on CNN on the premiums-gouging of the U.S.'s private sector health-insurers provides part of the explanation of why the U.S. health-care system is at least twice as inefficient as any other health-care system among industrialized economies. Anthem Blue Cross, in California, just announced a 39% price-hike on its insurance premiums. This was identical to the increase which this health-insurer recently announced in Massachusetts.

While the particular price-gouging of Anthem was especially egregious, premium-hikes have averaged 22% for Massachusetts this year. It is true that health-care costs are increasing faster than the rate of inflation in virtually every industrialized society (thanks to our aging populations, and irresponsible life-styles), however, keep in mind that in the fantasy-world of U.S. “statistics” that inflation is supposedly less than 2%. Even using John Williams' Shadowstats calculation that U.S. inflation is actually over 9%, the 20%+ premium-increases of U.S. health-insurers are totally indefensible.

The only justification for even allowing a system of private-sector health insurance (given the importance of this service) is if the private sector can generate sufficient “efficiencies” to allow it to manage an effective system – while still extracting profits for themselves. U.S. health-care insurers don't even come close to being able to justify their existence. Operating the world's most-inefficient health-care system and then extracting ever-fatter profits for themselves, on top of this, means that U.S. private insurers haven't been able to justify their existence for decades.

However, given the corrupt, two-party dictatorship which has usurped the U.S. “democracy”, private sector oligarchs no longer need to “justify” their parasitic behavior – instead, they merely need to “buy” enough U.S. representatives to block any reform of their bloated oligarchies. While some U.S. states are now enacting legislation to allow governments to unilaterally “roll back” excessive premium-hikes, that is literally only “half the battle” in attempting to reform these parasitic behemoths.

In “California's Death-Panels Fatten Profits for Private Insurers”, I pointed out how these private-sector bureaucracies are making (literally) “life and death” decisions on the lives of U.S. citizens – where expensive procedures (which are often the only hope for these medical patients) are rejected because some bureaucrat decides that a “cost/benefit analysis” of the probability of success (and the value of a human life) doesn't “justify” the cost of treatment.