Bushwhacked_ Life in George W. Bush's America Large Print - Molly Ivins [126]
The big winners in our cash-and-carry system of government are corporate special interests. Public Campaign reports that for a mere $48.9 million in political campaign contributions, from 1989 to the present, the managed health-care and health-insurance companies got protection from lawsuits by patients who have been denied medical care, defeat of proposed laws that would make it easier for patients to choose their own doctors and to get emergency-room visits reimbursed. We pay with over 41 million Americans lacking health insurance, billions in wasted premiums spent on advertising, duplicative paperwork, and insurance-company bureaucracies, including multimillion-dollar salaries for executives—and with unnecessary death and suffering when HMOs overrule doctors.
The health-care crisis is now a middle-class phenomenon. The entire health-care system is being robbed blind by hospital chains, HMOs, insurance companies, and drug companies. In March 2003 researchers for the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights reported in the Los Angeles Times that in 2002 the cost of health care increased 250 percent more than the rate of medical inflation.
PacificCare reported a $37 million profit in the fourth quarter of 2002 after raising premiums. The profits of Wellpoint, the parent company of Blue Cross, jumped 64 percent in the fourth quarter from the previous year: HMO stocks are up 23 percent, compared with the S&P index’s loss of 21 percent.
What the HMOs want the public to forget is that 12 percent to 33 percent of every premium dollar they collect is eaten by their increasing profits and overhead. Who is responsible for runaway costs if not the companies charging them? Analysts say that less of the premium dollar is going to patient care than ever before because of added levels of administration and profiteering. In addition to the HMOs, there are large physician-run medical groups, hospital chains with the power to demand higher profits and profit-hungry pharmaceutical markets and managers.
Had it not been for Gulf War II, the cratering of HealthSouth Corporation would have ranked right up there with Enron and Global Crossing. HealthSouth systematically overstated its earnings by at least $1.4 billion since 1999, “a massive accounting fraud,” according to the SEC. “HealthSouth’s fraud represents an appalling betrayal of investors,” said the SEC’s director of enforcement, Stephen Cutler.
What we have here is an interesting instance of what the weblog writer Mickey Kaus calls “the Jo Moore factor.” Jo Moore was the British civil servant who wrote a memo on September 11, 2001, saying to her colleagues, “If you have any bad news to put out there, today would be a good day to do it.” Interestingly enough, Ms. Moore, an embarrassment to Tony Blair’s government ever since that famous memo, was herself fired on the third day of Gulf War II.
For a lousy $318.7 million in contributions from 1991 to 2001, the resource-extracting industries (oil, gas, mining, electric utilities, chemical manufacturers, and timber) got $33 billion in tax breaks in the pending energy legislation alone. They also got a weakened Superfund toxic-cleanup law; freedom to remove the tops off mountains and dump the waste into valleys and streams; lax regulation of energy markets and other regulatory relief, such as not having to close high-pollution smokestacks. We pay with dirtier air and water; despoiled national parks, forests, and wil-derness; high rates of childhood asthma; millions in price gouging; and heavily polluted toxic-waste sites. You have to pay to play. Ka-ching, ka-ching.
And so it goes.
A specialty of the Bush style of governance is the old con man’s bait-and-switch tactic. Among the more notorious examples of this is his treatment of New York City’s firemen. When he went to Ground Zero shortly after September 11, Bush threw his arm around a tired, retired firefighter at the scene