Things are not going well on the AHIP - America's Health Insurance Plans (we feel your pain) tour of our battered nation.
Karen Ignagni the CEO of the health insurance lobbyist AHIP was taped yesterday in Ohio.
Ms. Ignagni carefuly explained that profit is the guiding principle of AHIP, the for-profit insurance industry, and tragically, the entire U.S. healthcare system.
She says, "no margin, no mission".
This is a bad day for AHIP, because their leader/CEO, Karen Ignagni, told the truth, probably for the first time in her life.
Isn't the first rule of politics, don't tell the truth? Well, she fumbled, badly.
Take a listen. I've provided a decent transcript of some of the tape.
Here are my notations on some of the more explosive moments on the tape.
Notice first how the PR flack wants to get Karen the hell out.
A woman named Kim asks: "You said you would not sacrifice profitability for membership . . .[you have] rules and regulations on how not to pay out money and you make profits off of that, people are dying, people are sick, it's disgusting, . . .I didn't want to have a conversation behind closed doors."
[You hear in the background someone, would I think is probably an AHIP flack saying "right, right", in an effort to get Kim to shut up.]
Kim persists: "Why would Angela Braly make such a comment? Would she sacrifice on the 9 million dollars she made this year, would she sacrifice?"
[Angela Braly is the CEO of Wellpoint. In April she told investors "we won't sacrifice profitability for membership". [applause]
Then a clearly uncomfortable flack says: "I told people we'd be out by 1 . . .let's take that as our last question."
Finally Karen Ignagni responds. What she said should be on the front page of every newspaper in America.
Again a rough but pretty accurate transcript.
Ignagni: "I have no problem with you asking the question . . .it's my approach to life. . ."
What comes next is so important, I'm putting it in a blockquote.
[Notice here, how she cleverly lays responsibility on doctors and hospitals]
Ignagni: "You talk to a hospital, you talk to a doctor, you talk to any concerns, you talk to a profit or not-for profit industry, you hear no margin, no mission. So the question is, you rather be in the black not the red, to do anything in our society is very important."
There you have it. The U.S. healthcare system is about profit Murder By Spreadsheet. Every dollar of healthcare they deny goes right to the bottom line. Insurance companies are finely-tuned and dangerously sophisticated healthcare denial machines.
Here's everything you need to know about how the money is being wasted from
Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP).
The U.S. spends twice as much as other industrialized nations on health care, $7,129 per capita. Yet our system performs poorly in comparison and still leaves 47 million without health coverage and millions more inadequately covered.
This is because private insurance bureaucracy and paperwork consume one-third (31 percent) of every health care dollar. Streamlining payment through a single nonprofit payer would save more than $350 billion per year, enough to provide comprehensive, high-quality coverage for all Americans.
And what do we get for all the money we shovel to the insurance industry? The U.S. now ranks last out of 19 countries on a measure of mortality amenable to medical care, falling from 15th as other countries raised the bar on performance.
The audio you just listened to is from HCAN.
To the credit of HCAN, in one of the slides it uses the phrase "murder by spreadsheet". This is good and true. Now HCAN should explain to the American people why single-payer (John Conyers HR 676) is the only remedy for all the healthcare atrocities they properly identify.
"No margin, no mission". Translated: No makee the money, no gettee the healthcare.
This woman, and all she represents will be sitting in the White House next to Barack Obama negotiating against the American people, and on behalf of profit margins for the insurance industry.
President Obama will have his hands full. We have no money for healthcare or for the extortion demanded by Karen Ignagni and AHIP. The United States is broke.
Yesterday the New York Times offered a bleak assessment of the Obama health plan, which if you don't already know it, is not what most of us would expect from the next Democratic President.
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