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By Diana Senechal
$24.95
By Steven Naifeh (Author), Gregory White Smith (Author)
$35
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Flickr / Katrina.Tuliao
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The geniuses on Wall Street have found another way to gamble and call it investing. Forget about mortgage-backed securities (wouldn’t that be nice?). Life insurance securitizations are the new hotness on Wall Street. And the fun part is, they make more money when you die faster.
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AP / Susan Walsh
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By Bill Boyarsky — By the time Congress returns from its recess and takes another whack at the health insurance mess, Rep. Henry Waxman will have started revealing the deceit that protects health business profiteers.
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AP / Lynne Sladky
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By The Rev. Madison Shockley — The demise of the recent “death panels” debate was quick and painless—unlike so many of the deaths that will occur among those who will now be without the benefit of their doctor’s knowledge of the dying process.
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Reports that President Obama may change his position on his proposal to set up a system of government health care insurance for Americans under 65 caused ripples, mostly on the left, and critics continued to clamor Monday for an alternative to private insurance companies.
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By Joshua Holland, AlterNet —
Forget the fearmongering scare tactics of the right, here’s how your life will actually be better.
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White House / Pete Souza
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The president and his lieutenants are on a whistle-stop tour of disappointment. It started Saturday, when Obama called the public insurance option “just one sliver of” health care reform, “whether we have it or we don’t have it. ... ” You don’t have to be clairvoyant to see the cave coming.
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What happened in the few months between the time when Glenn Beck denounced the dismal state of American health care and when he celebrated it as a systemic triumph just a smidge later? And can we replicate this one-man odyssey with a simple tweak of our own remote controls?
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AP
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Public memory often has a short shelf life, and it doesn’t preclude the potential for rapid recycling, according to The New York Times’ take on the current “death panel” controversy, considering that a prototypical version of this particular argument made the rounds during the (Internet-enabled) Clinton era.
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300
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The Obama administration is working to counter the myths about health care reform currently ricocheting around the Web, particularly those recently generated by a certain Alaska ex-governor, by attempting to kick another chain e-mail phenomenon into motion.
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By Joe Conason — The ugly fact is that every year we fail to reform the existing system, that failure condemns tens of thousands of people to die—either because they have no insurance or because their insurance companies deny coverage or benefits when they become ill.
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Robert Greenwald and Brave New Films have a simple but compelling health care argument: Compare the obscene earnings of one insurance CEO to the comparatively bargain claims his company has refused to honor. UnitedHealth Group CEO Stephen Hemsley, this clip argues, is personally profiting from the misery of children.
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What exactly do those dastardly Democrats mean when they talk about “community standards” vis-à-vis health care reform? Only one thing, of course—death panels! But hold on, Mr. Gingrich and Mme. Palin, where are either of those terms written anywhere in the reform proposals?
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AP / Alex Brandon
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So far, we’ve had the angry protests, the scuffles at suddenly volatile town hall meetings, and no resolution of the health care reform argument from our elected leaders, but President Barack Obama is now embarking on a campaign to try to sway public opinion on the issue using ... a series of town hall meetings across the country. Updated
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In this installment of Brave New Films’ “Senator Sanders Unfiltered,” the independent federal legislator from Vermont points out what’s becoming hard to dispute or ignore, however much other members of Congress might do both: Wall Street, along with the pharmaceutical and insurance industries, practically runs Washington.
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visitbulgaria.info
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For almost two years, insurance giant AIG has experienced quarterly losses—until now. The infamous company is reporting its first profitable quarter since 2007, a turnabout that will give the U.S. government a whopping $1.5 billion gain as a shareholder, while individual shareholders get to split $311 million among themselves.
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Sitting in for Keith Olbermann, an unusually stiff Howard Dean picks the brain of a former health insurance foot soldier about the government’s reform plans.
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By Ruth Marcus — If only Democrats and Republicans could get together and produce a health care bill that would expand coverage and control costs. But wait—there is such a proposal. In fact, there are two.
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finance.senate.gov
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Looks like the insurance companies are getting what they’ve paid for in the U.S. Congress. The Senate Finance Committee is closer to a deal with Republicans, which means no public health care option. The Blue Dogs, meanwhile, are still nipping at the heels of House Democrats.
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Flickr / David Paul Ohmer
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By Mike Elk —
When I heard Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont., floating the idea of a tax on health benefits in order to raise revenue for health-care reform, I was baffled; how could this be?
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speaker.gov
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Nancy Pelosi and her fellow progressive Democrats in the House have opened a can of health care whoop-ass that’s sure to drive Republicans and conservative Democrats nuts. The House bill, unveiled Tuesday, would tax the rich and businesses that skimp on health care coverage, provide a public option and require everybody to be covered.
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By Amy Goodman — Wendell Potter is the health insurance industry’s worst nightmare. He’s a whistle-blower. Potter, the former chief spokesperson for insurance giant CIGNA, recently testified before Congress, “I saw how they confuse their customers and dump the sick—all so they can satisfy their Wall Street investors.”
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Collage from Fox and James Montgomery Flagg
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Health care reform is shaping up as astronomically expensive, but that’s only if private insurers and Big Pharma get their way, writes Clinton-era Labor Secretary Robert Reich. Without competition from the government—a public option—the health care industry will continue to gouge and Americans will still be in the weeds, a trillion dollars poorer.
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AP photo / Esteban Felix
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By Eric W. Fonkalsrud, M.D., and Michael D. Intriligator, Ph.D. —
The best way to achieve universal health care in the U.S. is by expanding the popular and effective federal Medicare program. This restructuring would gradually extend benefits, first to the most needy and eventually to the entire population.
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The “Real Time” host has some harsh words for the president, who, he says, is caving to insurance companies, banks and polluters: “This is not getting the job done. And this is not what I voted for.”
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By Joe Conason — Big insurance and pharmaceutical companies are lobbying frantically (and spending millions of dollars) to foreclose the possibility of the most promising aspect of health care reform: a public insurance option.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — Remember the imaginary couple who appeared in the television ads that helped beat President Clinton’s health plan 15 years ago? That duo and the corporations behind them have switched sides in the debate, and for a good reason: 50 million new customers.
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telegraph.co.uk
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It looks like the $150 billion bailout of AIG included everything but advertising funds. After four years of the insurance giant’s logo gracing the jerseys of one of the world’s most famous soccer teams, troubled economic times are bumping the iconic symbol in favor of a new sponsor.
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By Marie Cocco — The defenders of the health care status quo have been frantically arguing these past few weeks that any coming reform of the health insurance system cannot include a public insurance plan, even if that’s the whole point.
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abcnews.com
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At least 30,000 private contractors have been injured in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the vast majority are insured by AIG. According to an investigation by ABC News, ProPublica and the Los Angeles Times, the insurance giant does about as good a job helping wounded contractors as gaming the derivatives market.
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visitbulgaria.info
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Having succeeded in dispensing tens of millions of dollars to company executives last week as the country—and Congress—cried foul, the insurance titan is now suing the government to reclaim millions in taxes. Apparently AIG officials believe they paid the IRS too much and now are demanding a huge tax rebate.
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By Marie Cocco — An idea that has been around for years now has reached that rarest of moments: There is a political environment that should, if reason prevails, produce legislation to require the Food and Drug Administration to regulate tobacco products.
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By Eugene Robinson — The last thing the surgeon said to me before they rolled me into the operating room was, “You know, if you and Obama had your way with health care, it wouldn’t be me doing this operation. It would just be some guy.”
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AP photo / Ron Edmonds
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AIG’s dishing out $165 million in bonuses to executives who played a part in bringing their company to near ruin is an “outrage,” according to President Barack Obama, who pledged to do whatever he can to stop the payouts at the bailed-out insurance giant. Updated
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — The House this week is expected to vote to expand civilian service, and the Senate will soon take up a similar bill. This issue holds the promise of producing that much prized but elusive Washington commodity: a large bipartisan majority.
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By David Sirota — Republicans insist that “competition solves health care,” and tell us that government programs are worse than private health insurance. So, don’t they welcome a private-versus-public competition, believing that the former will trump the latter? Well ... uh ... no.
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By Marie Cocco — No Wall Street rally can obscure the scary historical prospect that most Americans now working can expect to have less income security in retirement than their parents had.
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By Amy Goodman — Obama promises health-care reform, but he has taken single-payer health care off the table. While single-payer reduces the administrative costs and removes the profit that insurance companies add to health-care delivery, such solutions get almost no space in the debate.
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By Marie Cocco — Obama’s bid to reduce the taxpayer-funded slush fund that flows to the managed-care insurance industry through Medicare is an emphatic, if overdue, effort to turn Washington around.
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Flickr / Foraggio Fotographic
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By Joe Conason — We suddenly seem willing to consider sensible ideas that were always deemed unthinkable. Soon we may be mature enough to observe how other developed countries address problems that have baffled us for generations.
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By Marie Cocco — It is time to wipe the term entitlement reform, a monument to the dark art of disinformation, out of the political dictionary. There is no crisis in Social Security, or even in Medicare and Medicaid.
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AP photo / M. Spencer Green
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By Bill Boyarsky — The national health care crisis, intensified by the recession, is so bad that nothing can be permitted to stop reform of the system, not even the implosion of the president’s health czar.
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By Joe Conason — Mythology is overshadowing history in the debate over Obama’s plan to stimulate the depressed economy. Excessive airtime is devoted to the prejudices of cable hosts and radio personalities who regurgitate ideas they barely understand.
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By Marie Cocco — The reason you are such a big story is that you’ve stolen our money. Or at least that’s how most of the country sees it. You think those auto executives looked bad when they flew into Washington on their private jets? Just you wait.
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By Marie Cocco — After eight years of trickle-down tax cuts that pushed the prosperous up and left most everyday Americans sliding further down, the stimulus bill now moving swiftly through Congress is more than a reversal of political course. Let’s hope it’s not too late.
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By Ellen Goodman — After the collapse of trust in every sort of expert—after lenders financed houses for people who couldn’t afford them, bankers created systems they couldn’t even describe and, finally, we hear, Bernie Madoff ripped off even his high school friends—there is a residue of resilience.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — Obama has made it hard for anyone to pin him down philosophically. So when he raises his hand on Tuesday, exactly what can the American people expect?
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