Moneyed Politicians

Let’s hope so!

By Jack E. Lohman

Otherwise we will spend years trying to put lipstick on this pig, all while transferring huge public funds to the insurance executives and their politician co-conspirators.

ObamaCare is a terrible solution and would not have been passed without the $125 million in campaign bribes passing to our trusted and esteemed politicians. Money works, as was proven here when single-payer was kept off the table.

Let’s kill it and do it right.

Yes, some good things have happened with it, but what will we have after we are 100% into it? A garbage system that still rewards the insurance executives. And the politicians who get a piece of the booty.

There *IS* a better way but the politicians don’t want to go there… because their cash flow will stop.

Better options? Medicare-for-all or VA-for-all!

Medicare is not perfect, and our politicians want to keep it that way. Fixing it would remove some of the stigma that helps them pad their wallets and get re-elected.

Medicare’s biggest problem is that it pays physicians on a fee-for-service basis rather than on a straight salary. Thus “over-ordering” provides a financial incentive, which incidentally exists in the private system as well. The VA system solves that by paying salaries, but because of the wars it is simply overloaded.

If we want to fix healthcare we need simply to mandate that our congressmen and staff are limited to the same system they mandate for the elderly and poor. Got that Rep. Ryan?

A government-run system cannot give campaign bribes but a privatized system can.

But let’s not accuse our politicians of being smart!

By Jack E. Lohman

Taiwan experts traveled the world looking for the best healthcare model to copy for their own country, and settled on (drum-roll please), America’s Medicare system. With 100% private doctors and hospitals, only with government payment rather than insurance company and employer payment.

And it works! With better health outcomes than ours (because they cover 100% of their citizens) they implemented it at a total cost of 7% of GDP. (Our costs are 17.5% of GDP with insurance company profits and administration!)

And they relieved employers from the cost of providing health care, and allowed 100% portability for employees wanting to change jobs or start new businesses. What’s not to like about that?

100% in, 0% out

Everybody is covered at less than half our costs, because they’ve eliminated the middleman. Instead of insurers taking 20% off the top and distributing the rest, a government’s private contractor distributes the money. Same medical services are paid for, except without the private mark-up for CEO salaries and retirement benefits, shareholder profits, actuarial and legal fees, marketing and broker commissions, and even political costs (campaign contributions) which are added to the bottom line and passed onto the consumers.

But get this…

100% of today’s inflated costs are passed onto consumers, if not through premiums then certainly when businesses add their healthcare costs to the price of their product and we reimburse them at the cash register.

And those costs (less the 20% of insurer waste) are also picked up by the taxpayers under a single-payer plan as well. Or however, but the same people paying today will also pay tomorrow…  one way or the other. The trick is selecting the best way to do it.

Today we are paying in the worst way possible by forcing employers to pay the bill and add their costs to the price of their product. OR, by taking their jobs to places like Taiwan, where their system does not penalize employers. And all of this so our politicians can give their insurer-friends 20% of the pie? Duh!!!

… more political corruption!

By Jack E. Lohman

Why are we diverted by theoretical economists to little fires, instead of looking at this nation’s ACTUAL, #1 problem: the looters of our economy (bankers, oil speculators, hedge fund managers) paying off the politicians that pave their road to more wealth … at the expense of the many?

The answer, of course, is BECAUSE those politicians get a piece of the action… in campaign bribes, and they write the laws that permit it!!!

These same politicians also REFUSE to write laws to stop it and create jail time for the offenders…

It can get worse!

So here’s the good news: China has its problems too! China’s Billionaire People’s Congress Makes Capitol Hill Look Like Pauper

China ranks #78 on the international corruption index. Not to worry, though, the U.S. is #22!

The U.S. is NOT #1… it’s #22!!!

21 from the top!!!

Political corruption will bury us if we don’t force public funding of campaigns. I want these jokers working for the public rather than private interests, and the only way we’ll get there is with a 100% turnover in November.

Defense Industry Fraud?

I’m hearing (on TV, if you can believe the media) that over the last decade roughly $2 trillion of defense industry spending cannot be accounted for. It doesn’t surprise me.

I’d certainly start looking for dummy-companies… companies in name only where defense employees with sufficient authority have put them on the payroll (issued dummy contracts for dummy services) so the taxpayer money passed through can be laundered to their own personal wealth.

But no politician wants to touch it!!!

How do they get by with it?

As Rick Santorum says, by “giving one for the team!”  Even when you personally oppose things like funding the Bridge to Nowhere, which he voted for (and I am sure got paid well for it).

It’s called “Getting ready for a military takeover!”

NOBODY wants to talk about it, but I worry.

Here we have the government passing more and more laws to curb individual freedoms, even making it illegal (in 3 states already) to videotape a policeman committing a crime or abusing a citizen.

And more and more of the middle class are sinking to the lowest class, and the government is privatizing our armed services (Halliburton and Bechtal and you name it), and I wonder:

What’s next? A total rebellion, Egypt-style?

Yea, these leakers have trashed our economy, and it’s time for them to go. We would expect that in Syria and elsewhere; let’s do as we say.

By Jack E. Lohman

With an acceptance rating of less than 10%, our congressional members must do what they are demanding of Syria’s Assad: they must step down from their leadership role and call for a new election in America.

100% of them; no exceptions!

There are many things wrong with the way politicians run our country, but they all hover around one core issue: political corruption.  Rocky Anderson hits the nail squarely on the head with his assessment. Whether he’s our next president or not, he’s got to be better than Obama and his Republican opponent.

Our core problem is our corrupt politicians

Whether you oppose the wars, oppose our nation’s drug policies, oppose our broken health care system, oppose the 1%, oppose the jobs’ export to other countries, look at your leadership. As long as they are getting cash dollars from the other side, you will remain on the outside looking in.

I do not like advocating for a change in government. But if we don’t do it voluntarily today, it will be forced on us by the American crazies with guns.

I do not believe for a moment that the US is beyond a military takeover. Here we are creating and training a private army, maybe even for the benefit of the politicians behind said funding. If you are part of the 90% that do not trust our current congress, how can you possibly trust them when the chips are down???

They have to go… NOW!

Why are we surprised? The oil industry still owns our politicians!

By Jack E. Lohman

Gas prices will go up to $5, because they CAN!

Get used to it. At least until late summer, when Obama gets tough just before the elections.

You’ll hear a lot about oil “speculators,” and he’s right. They are the number one problem. It’s not Iran. Our economy is rebounding and they want the cash in their pockets instead of yours. So they buy refinery-tank-fulls and hoard product until they have to back off.

And, much of the oil we refine in the U.S. and export to other countries. Oil is this nation’s biggest export, and our politicians want to keep it that way because they get a piece of the action.

It’s the free market, don’cha know.

Obama won’t do anything drastic because they help fund his elections. And the Republicans won’t do anything because also help fund their elections! (They could ban speculating/hoarding of vital product, but that would curtail campaign bribes.)

This is a game. Two people can play, the D’s and R’s.

There’s only one winner, but it’s never you. This is 100% a two-party game. They both know the problem, and they know the solution, but neither wants to go there because they are both on the take.

But you lose… and you should lose.

At least until you get smart enough to throw out both political parties. But to date the electorate has allowed the villains to divide and divert them. We’ve got to be smarter than this.

The fix?

Yea, there is one. First, throw all of the bastards out of office! None of them should stay! UNTIL they pass public funding of campaigns, and then we can start to move forward and re-anchor our families.

Step 1) A public-option OIL company. Let’s (the taxpayers) buy up the next failing oil company, or build one from scratch. Imagine the new jobs that would be created, with consumer rather than taxpayer money.

Step 2) A public-option bank! Let’s not bail out the next failing bank, let’s buy it! Of course, Bank of America would be gone in a heartbeat, but so would be our economic woes.

Step 3) A public-option car company! No more bailing out General Motors, they either run it right or lose it! And then we taxpayers will run it and set the CEO salaries ourselves. And the prices of our cars.

But wait, all of our political bastards get campaign bribes from these guys!

Say goodbye to that, too! With all of this public option stuff going around, political bribes will not be useful.

Remember this: “PUBLIC OPTION!” What’s not to like about that?

The free market will not just survive, but even hum with all of these newly competitive industries.

Now we’re really in trouble… we’re talking “socialized medicine!”

By Jack E. Lohman

The reality is that — one way or another — we Americans, 100% of us, pay for 100% of all nationwide healthcare costs. Whether through increased employer costs that are passed on to the consumers at the cash registers, or through taxation. So, the big question is,

“why don’t we do this the right way from the beginning? Eliminate all unnecessary costs for industry profit and over-use and fraud, and just pay the damned bill and move on to fixing our real national issues???”

Yes, we hear all of these terrible things about Canada’s and Britain’s systems, but we hear it mostly from the for-profit insurance and private interests that also want to make their country’s system privatized and profitable like (God forbid) America’s!

The actual public — the peons and patients — love what they have because it gets the thing done — better, and at half the cost of America’s profit-making system, which is set to satisfy only the vultures.

Polls show that 80% of Canadians prefer their system to ours. Yes there are wait times for non-critical procedures, but not for urgent needs. And they could even eliminate the waits they have by increasing their spending from 10% to 12% of GDP (ours is 17.5%).

The most efficient is the V.A. Medical Center

Think Walter Reed and Bethesda Medical Center, government-run systems that have cared for (the well-respected) Dick Cheney and other government bigwigs. Not too shabby, I would say.

Yea, the V.A. system is currently overloaded because of the wars, but give them all of our private hospitals and physician clinics and they’d do a lot better than our privatized system. And incidentally, let them buy the failing Mt. Sinai here in Milwaukee and start the ball rolling.

Oh, but the right-wing ideologues would have kittens. “Government run??? You’ve got to be kidding!!!”

And clearly they’d have some good arguments. Government bureaucrats are sometimes worse than profit gougers. There’s just no in-between.

Or is there?

Let’s have the Federal Government (taxpayers) subcontract Universal Health Care to Halliburton or Boeing (okay, just kidding but you get the point) or another well-respected non-profit private entity. Expand the V.A. system to all Americans!

We taxpayers would be the only shareholders, and we’d establish a non-partisan board of directors (picked not by politicians but by a combination of health care professionals).

The only incentive will be executive wages, paid on a performance basis, which would be established by the board. With a $1 million CEO salary cap. And employee salaries. The doctors would be salaried (very well, I might add) with only one goal: good, solid, patient care.

And the estimated trillion-dollar-per-year savings?

We’ll find a place for it.

All of this may make sense but it is not accompanied by a campaign check. So making it happen will be difficult.

Medicare-for-all or single-payer are hopefuls, but both are still subject to over-billing and fraud. And politicians.

By Jack E. Lohman

Mainly political corruption. Because with this system the insurance industry is not needed, or at best, it plays a minimal role by providing “Gap” insurance to cover co-pays and deductibles. Thus they are willing to pay big money to the politicians who block it.

Guys like Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT) and Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) are high on their list, but should be at the bottom of yours. They have their own gold-plated taxpayer-funded health care plan, even after their retirement. They are fixed for life.

Single-payer is a term we use, because the taxpayer is that payer. Medicare, Medicaid, and BadgerCare are all in that category, but importantly they only provide the administrative services. It all cases the medical services are provided by the same private hospitals and doctors we are currently using.

It makes a lot of sense, but that’s exactly why it is having problems attracting politician support.

Getting rid of the high profits to shareholders, high CEO salaries and benefits, sales commissions, excessive legal fees for defending denials and cherry-picking, and the cost of political bribes is key. Still remaining as problems is the fee-for-service system of compensating physicians, which encourages over-ordering, and the lack of a Certificate of Need which discourages overbuilding and the purchase of expensive MRI and other high-tech instrumentation.

Deductibles and co-pays are generally counter-productive

They keep patients away from the doctor and allow minor problems to escalate to more costly problems. People sometimes just can’t afford them, and even so, their cost of administration is often equal to the payment. Yes, unnecessary doctor visits may result without them, but few people relish sitting in a doctor’s waiting room unless they feel they need it.

Getting single-payer on the table

Not an easy thing when politicians are paid to keep it off the table. About eight healthcare activists attempted to get it discussed and were arrested for disturbing the peace at a Senate Finance meeting. Just allow a vote on it, was all they asked. Sen. Max Baucus, with his $5 million from the healthcare industry, wouldn’t have any such thing.

Rep. John Conyers had HR676, a Medicare-for-all system that would have cut $400 billion from our nation’s healthcare tab while providing health care to 100% of our citizens.

From the public’s standpoint …

… single-payer makes sense, because it gets employers out of the business of providing healthcare and it allows portability — giving people the opportunity to quit their job and start a new business on their own — without the fear of killing healthcare for their family.

But it doesn’t make sense for the politicians because it will kill campaign contributions.

From a cost standpoint, a Medicare-for-all makes sense for the taxpayers AND the business community… the non-insurance businesses, that is.

Our current system, filled with political corruption, high costs, excessive profits, denials, retroactive exclusions and fraud.

By Jack E. Lohman

The system is filled with the profit motive, even at the expense of the patient, and the politicians share the profits. So the political fix is not going to be easy, regardless of which of the two parties are in control, because they both take campaign bribes.

Hospitals have evolved from non-profit church-run institutions to corporations with CEOs and shareholders, too many of which give cash dollars to politicians so the rules are weakened to satisfy their profits. Cash dollars (campaign bribes) flowed before the state legislature nullified the Certificate of Need (CON).

The CON prevented hospitals from building wherever they wanted, and here in Milwaukee we saw new hospitals built near old hospitals “to compete.”

But they didn’t compete because they bought up the local physician clinics (their referral base) and are actually allowed to pay the doctors “productivity bonuses” for admitting patients and performing even more expensive MRIs and other tests and surgeries (whether needed or not).

Thanks but no thanks. We don’t need that type of competition, which drives costs up, not down.

Doctors, incidentally, should be paid very well, but not on the basis of how many tests or surgeries they perform or don’t perform (which is now the case). It’s what they call fee-for-service and applies to both private insurance and Medicare, though Medicare reimburses at a lower (though still profitable) rate. Indeed we have seen doctors who have maxed out their schedule refuse Medicare patients and hold out for non-Medicare patients.

Insurance companies are middlemen that simply profit from the system. More so from well people who need no medical services, and less so from people who really are sick and need care. Remember that only those requiring care increase our costs.

The insurance industry is virtually unregulated where it counts and have even cancelled insurance policies retroactively in what are called rescissions. One woman was refused breast cancer coverage because she failed to report the acne she had as a teenager, as just one ploy they use.

And denials of care are common, like the liver transplant for a 17-year-old girl in California. CIGNA finally approved it after months of public and media pressure, but the girl died the afternoon it was finally approved. Thanks CIGNA, for keeping your profits up front.

Fraud happens, mainly because virtually any outside billing system allows it. Bad guys obtain social security and insurance numbers, even after the patients die, and both private and Medicare are affected. Any time outside billing is allowed, inappropriate billing will occur, and in our case it is estimated at 10% of our total costs.

The Feds should reward outside contractors to pursue villains.

Sadly, we must rely on our politicians, who get a piece of the action in campaign bribes to keep the system broken.