American Conspiracies - Jesse Ventura [107]
As for the health care debate: Insurance industry lobbyists are opposing reform at a record pace, having spent an astounding $32 million on TV ads as of October.68 Have you ever heard of the MLR? That stands for “Medical Loss Ratio”:“the fancy term used by health insurance companies for their slice, their take-out, their pound of flesh, their gross—very gross—profit. The ‘MLR’ is the difference between what you pay an insurance company and what that insurer pays out to doctors, hospitals and pharmacists for your medical care.” The MLR is about to top a quarter trillion dollars a year. AIG has “kicked up their Loss Ratio by nearly 500 percent.”69
Are we that selfish a nation where health care can be such a divisive issue? Where is mainstream America today? To me, the doctor issue is a human right. I don’t care if you’re an illegal alien or whatever, if you’re sick you should be able to have treatment. It amazes me that we’ve got people out there holding signs and making our president look like a Nazi, because he supports a change in the system. Here’s another point: If government-run health care is so bad, does that mean we’ve been screwing over our veterans for close to a hundred years? My father would go nowhere else but to the Veterans Administration hospital. The one here in Minneapolis is state-of-the-art, brand-new, and completely government-run, and I don’t see anyone protesting about that! If it’s good enough for the veterans, shouldn’t it be the same for all of us?
As I write this, unemployment stands at ten percent of our work force, foreclosures are still happening at around 10,000 a day, people defaulting on their credit cards has hit a record, and across the country the states are having to slice crucial services to the bone. As governor, when we had a budget that went over what we’d allocated, I gave checks back to the people. That was a true stimulus package. When people at home have more money in their pockets, they tend to spend it. Cutting taxes also stimulates the economy, as much as Democrats hate the sound of it. In this case, the taxes coming out of our pockets are just making the rich get richer. “Nine of the financial firms that were among the largest recipients of federal bailout money paid about 5,000 of their traders and bankers bonuses of more than $1 million apiece for 2008.”70 For the fiscal year that ended in October 2008, the IRS audited only about four out of every hundred Americans who showed income of $1 million and up. IRS data also showed that the income of the 400 wealthiest individuals in the country hit an average of $263 million in 2006. Within a decade, their share of our nation’s wealth almost doubled—to more than 22 percent.71
Meantime, the offshore tax havens haven’t gone away. Citigroup, for example, has 91 subsidiaries in Luxembourg and another 90 in the Cayman Islands (out of 427 units in 23 countries altogether).72 The Caymans are part of Great Britain, and more than 12,000 “companies” operate out of a single building there. The Caymans lay claim to being the fifth largest center of bank deposits in the world; while it’s true that the shares, bonds, and cash are technically on the islands, they’re actually headquartered back in New York. The $1.9 trillion in bank deposits, although it’s invested in the U.S. and abroad, remains invisible to the IRS. If you ever wondered why Enron paid no taxes, that’s because they created hundreds of these paper companies. Oh, and Dick Cheney’s Halliburton subsidiary, KBR, pays at least 21,000 of its employees through subsidiaries