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Archive for the ‘Opinion’ Category

The entire “managed health” component of the privatized healthcare system which we now “enjoy” in the United States descended from the HMO Act of 1973, signed into law by the President whom Hunter S Thompson had famously claimed “could shake your hand and stab you in the back at the same time”. The insurance system we have today, primarily built on the foundation of the profit-inducing-but-patient-screwing HMO system, has built in something called a “moral hazard”, which ostensibly provides the conservatives’ requisite “skin in the game“. For those unfamiliar with this concept, a simplified version of the basic premise is that forcing a patient to cover a certain amount of a medical procedure will decrease the “risk” than an insurance company will have to pay for a procedure.

Let’s stop right here, for a brief moment. The idea that an insurance company, being a for-profit entity with a primary obligation to their shareholders, rather than their clients, has an *incentive* not to pay for a procedure — well, it seems pretty awful. It’s one of the primary deficits in a for-profit health insurance scheme that the three primary parties involved (doctor, patient, insurance company) all have different objectives, which jive with each other (doctor wants to receive pay for care given, patient wants to receive care, and insurance company wants to pay as little as possible, if anything). You can see that the insurance company seems to be the party whose goals seem to disagree with the rest, and it’s the reason why I believe that a private insurer system is doomed to ever-rising costs, risk of medical bankruptcy, loss of accountability, pure graft and corruption, higher mortality rates, loss of quality care, as well as an inevitable collapse. But I digress from my primary point.

We can examine the idea of a moral hazard in health insurance by looking at the general purpose it supposedly serves: reducing the demand for profit-draining healthcare payments. The problem with that argument is that patients do not voluntarily seek unnecessary care in quantities which would cause a system of requiring patient payment to be necessary to reduce risk. Patients seek care when they require it, which means that the only care for which it would decrease the demand would be preventative care. If you follow the aforementioned link, you’ll see that the entire focus of most studies is the efficacy of preventative care in *decreasing costs to insurers* rather than decreasing mortality rates or improving quality of life. That follows a pretty common trend of insurers to perform cost/benefit analyses without the benefit of measuring the *benefits* of treatment options on patients.

So, we have private insurers, attempting to gain a greater profit margin by either denying care to patients for arbitrary reasons, or attempting to bolster profit margins by requiring deductibles and/or co-payments to dissuade patients from seeking care, encourage patients to seek less expensive/less effective methods of treatment, and/or decrease the amount of payout for which they are responsible. It seems as though parties with those motivations would be less-than-ideal candidates for effectively making healthcare and treatment decisions for the public at large, although they do that at the moment, by deciding which treatments to cover, which patients to insure, and how much of a patients’ own money must be spent for healthcare treatment for conditions which may or may not have anything to do with their own action. Not much of a “moral hazard” to avoid there, is there? If a factory worker gets cancer from working in a factory — who pays? Certainly not the factory. Whose fault is the condition? Not the patient. If unsafe drinking water produces parasitic infections or a more hazardous condition — who pays? Not the people responsible. Whose fault is the condition? Not the patient.

I would posit that your opinion of the for-profit healthcare system depends largely on your relationship to it; those who believe that profit is more important than the efficacy of patient care would most likely side with the current system (as well as the unconditional free market leghumpers), whereas those who see healthcare as more of a basic human right or regard the efficacy of care as being the paramount point of importance over the profit of a company would most likely favor a single-payer or socialized healthcare system. (I leave out the uninformed, teabaggers (who also fit in the prior category), and full-on anti-Federalists. There’s no reasoning about human dignity or health with people who believe that some people have the right to do whatever they want to other people due to the size of their wallets — but that’s for another post.)

Finally, there’s some sort of populist anger against the bastards who tanked the economy in 2008 to pad their pockets. It’s just too bad that there isn’t a cohesive set of demands to go along with all of that rage.

For too long, media-created “populists” like the teabaggers have railed against liberal policies, diversity, and government in general to attempt to explain the uncontrolled collapse of the United States’ economy. I’ve heard explainations (discredited, of course), ranging from the Community Reinvestment Act to “too much regulation”, but I find it rather difficult to understand why the Occupy Wall Street protesters seem myopically obsessed with the Bush Tax Cuts and the Citizens United decisions — as if they caused this clusterfuck. Make no mistake, both are odious; one for draining our reserves and forcing us into “emergency” austerity measures for the sake of bolstering the top 1% of Americans (Bush Tax Cuts), and the other for removing the common man’s political power by allowing money, disproportionately held by the top 1% of Americans, to unduly influence the political process (Citizens United).

The root causes of the economic downturn are far, far simpler. We can explain some of it through the greed of multinational corporations, who choose to outsource labor, decrease benefits, and shunt money away from their labor pool to benefit investors and the parasite investor class to an onerous degree. We can explain it through a systematic dismantling of financial system regulations which have been in place since the aftermath of the Great Depression, including, but not limited to: the Depository Institutions Deregulation and Monetary Control Act of 1980 (Carter), the Garn-St. Germain Depository Institutions Act of 1982 (Reagan), the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999 (Clinton) and the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000 (Clinton). Let’s not forget our ol’ pal Dubya, with his OCC tricks and gutting the regulatory system. Make no mistake, the primary causes of this clusterfuck are the greed of the banks and the fact that our leadership has been making it much easier for banks to have their way with you, virtually regulation-free. And they’ve been working at it for at least thirty years.

Putting aside greed and deregulation — banks (being considered the hypothetical sociopathic “persons”) — are bastards. Real bastards. Let’s take the example of Bank of America, which is (at the moment) one of the most hated financial institutions in the United States, with the possible exception of Goldman Sachs. I was listening to the radio this morning, and a spokesman for some shill PR group for the consumer banking industry was railing on about “regulations from Washington” and “that Dick Durbin” forcing the poor, helpless banks to institute five dollar a month ATM/debit card usage fees. I think that my rage culminated in his line about how he thought government regulations were hurting banks, evidenced by the mass layoffs at Bank of America. Let’s remember that those layoffs aren’t going to touch the parasite investor class’s ROI, and definitely not the CEO-level compensation or bonus package structure. Nope, not at all. Also, the shills for the banking industry don’t want us to remember that they don’t really make their money off of ATM or usage fees — they’re just a byproduct of suckering you into giving them your money.

Banks make money off of “fractional reserve lending/banking“. They essentially loan money into existence, but it requires a certain fraction of the money they’re loaning out to be “on hand”. This is where *your* money comes into play. You give them your paycheck, and see a nice dollar amount show up on your ATM screen or bank statement — but that money was just fed into the grist mill of short term, long term and mortgage loans. And if you have a home loan through BofA as well, they’re basically charging you to loan your own money back to you. (And they wonder why they’re some of the most hated institutions on the planet.)

That complete disconnection from reality is what, I believe, is fueling public anger — and their insistence in blaming “the gub’mint” for regulating them *too much* (I know, I know, it’s insane to even try to digest that, only a few years after deregulating their derivative trading, commodity trading, and general shaft-up-the-backside to the consumer, that they would consider blaming *too much* government intervention for them sucking, but I digress…) isn’t going to fly.

I hope the protests stay peacefully and spread. The protesters may not be unified (or completely informed), but they have the right idea — and their anger is finally directed at the right group of people.

The Masters of the Universe seem to have a vested interest in the death of 99+ week unemployment benefits, which I’m just starting to realize.

There is a pretty substantial inverse relationship between the DJIA and unemployment rates. By “unemployment rates”, we’re not talking about the Bureau of Labor Statistics U-6 numbers, indicating our entire workforce, but rather the more limited U-3 numbers, which indicate “Total unemployed, as a percent of the civilian labor force”. Let’s face it, it’s in the best interest of the ruling parties to keep the official unemployment rate low, to boost perception.

Shit, if I were to take a quick look at the DOL page on unemployment, it paints a bleaker picture than the rally in the DJIA which Bloomberg reports is tied to an “increase in job openings”. (Their “live ticker” for official unemployment numbers is here.)

What does this have to do with the “Masters of the Universe”? They’re going to be making a *killing* in the order of billions of dollars as stock prices predictably rise, of course. Doesn’t matter that we are losing manufacturing jobs due to globalization efforts and increased mechanization, or that stagnant wages and rising income disparity means you’ll die poorer and your upward mobility in terms of income is, for all intents and purposes, stalled. Even Ben Bernanke, money printer extraordinaire, says that we’re creating two separate societies this way.

So, why cut off extended unemployment benefits? I mean, unless you’re a brain-dead deficit hawk or a “I’ve got mine so fuck the rest of you” Libertarian, they actually have a pretty positive economic stimulus effect. More so than the pointless tax “cuts” that we’re going to extend until we’re ass-broke, at any rate. The only reason I can think of involves pumping up the stock market, which currently out-earns our manufacturing industry as a percentage of GDP.

I’ve decided to do a little feature on films that I liked for one reason or another, and to start out, I have chosen a scifi/comedy flick from the 1980s called The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension.

It’s a pretty funny send-up of scifi movies which take themselves too seriously. I think that after watching it, it’s pretty apparent that none of the actors were told that it was supposed to be a comedy. Peter Weller plays the entire movie completely straight, which makes his lines all the funnier. John Lithgow was very funny, in his strange and quirky way.

It was apparently very difficult for the studio that owned it to release “Buckaroo Banzai” because of some legal issues, but it finally made it to DVD in the last few years.

• iMDB Link
• Netflix Link