45 Million Uninsured, BUT—

"Good News:" A Health Insurer Reports Soaring Profits
The quarterly earnings statement of one of the nation’s largest health insurers this week reported increased profits of nearly 155 per cent above a year ago. Its net earnings were more than $850 million.
All of us, in the midst of the recession malaise and the catastrophic loss of jobs, are expected to stand up and applaud this triumph of American corporate enterprise.
All of us, it should be added, with the exception of the more than 45 million people in America who aren’t covered by health insurance and can’t afford a cancer checkup. Add the thousands who are losing it every day.
The story in one of the newspapers I read detailing the big profit increase offered a caveat to head off any rash notion that the world is peaches and cream for corporate health insurers. “Unemployment could continue to surge,” it warned, “cutting membership roles (those who can afford insurance). Health reform could produce a government health plan, creating competition and crimping profit.”
Oh, the ugliness of it for the swashbucklers of the insurance industry--health care reform and actual competition in the market place for the corporate health insurers, who are now free to pick and choose who they are going to insure and whose lives they have the power to save.
And the debate drones on, each day diminishing the credibility of the reform advocates.
It widens the target zone for the obstructer posses who have outlasted and outtalked their quarreling opponents before. They are primed, combative and confident they can do it again. Poll results, being brandished and plugged on the networks, now tell us that the American people are getting tired of it and want nothing more than peace and quiet.
Except the 45 million who have no protection.
Most Americans don’t fully understand the internals of the competing policy plans now being discussed in the daily rag-chewing of the congressional deliberations. How could they?
What we know for certain is the ferocity of the opposition to health care reform and to any significant measure of government involvement in that reform. We also know for certain that, every day, thousands of Americans are losing their homes and in danger of adding to the toll of the uninsured. We also know the virtually forgotten truth of the debate is that the American health care system in its present form is one of the most inefficient and costliest in the civilized world, a cost swelled by claims agents whose primary jobs are to deny claims.
But the very complexity of reforming it through the legislative process, the horse-trading involved in it, is an open invitation to the “outs” in today’s political climate in Washington. That is to ignore the reality of millions of Americans being squeezed harder every day by a recession brought on by the same voices of greed and privilege who are now trying to sink health care reform.
It’s time, one of them heroically announced, “to move in for the kill,” meaning bury the reform and with it the Democrats’ cred when they go before the voters in 2010 and 2012,
These are the same voices that howled in pain a few weeks ago at the thought of any serious restrictions on the banking and credit card industries in their dismal collaboration to dupe customers with small print language that would bewitch a courtroom of lawyers.
They are the same voices that told us Wall Street could be trusted to weed out the crooks and shills who are now being paid millions of dollars by the taxpayers to dig the country out of the financial crash they ignited.
The alternative for fighting this fight to the finish is to postpone a showdown on health and the risk of defeat.
Do that, and everybody loses, except those who don’t have to worry about insurance.


By Jim Klobuchar
Jim Klobuchar Writes
July 22,2009

Jim Klobuchar returns to an arena that will be familiar to his readers when he was a columnist for the MINNEAPOLIS STAR TRIBUNE. You’ll find here a periodic mix of commentary and personal reflections drawn from a lifetime in daily journalism. They might season your day.





cJim Klobuchar