Crush This Enemy
Ehrenreich, Barbara
Flip Side Barbara Ehrenreich Crush This Enemy Bow your heads and raise the white flags. After facing down the Third Reich, the Japanese empire, the U.S.S.R, Manuel Noriega, and Saddam Hussein, the...
...Think of the damage...
...It's also a bigtime employer, paying more than 400,000 people just to turn down claims, according to economist Paul Krugman...
...And that's another thing your insurance premium has to pay for: the ongoing "war" between doctors and insurers...
...Will I be arrested if I resist paying $10,000 a year for a private policy laden with killer co-pays and deductibles...
...That's the 9/11 carnage multiplied by six—every year...
...No matter how shabby you look, Cartier, Lexus, or Nordstrom's will happily take your money...
...Saddam Hussein never killed 18,000 Americans or anything close...
...Not Aetna...
...As for the executives, there should be an adequate job training program for them—per-haps as home health aides...
...What country in its right mind would pay so many people to deny other people health care...
...Edwards and Obama propose universal health insurance plans that would in no way ease the death grip of Aetna, Unicare, MetLife, and the rest of the evildoers...
...It's a war with insurance, every step of the way...
...As for the hundreds of thousands of industry employees whose sole job it is to turn down claims, well, I have a plan for them: It's called unemployment...
...soil its pants when confronted with the insurance industry...
...If you have a prior conviction—excuse me, a pre-existing condition—it doesn't want your business...
...Atul Gawande, a practicing physician, wrote in The New Yorker that "a well-run office can get the insurer's rejection rate down from 30 percent to, say, 15 percent...
...Private health insurance is only for people who aren't likely to ever get sick...
...I heard it from a notable liberal political scientist on a panel in August, and in September from the leader of a Chicago nonprofit agency serving the poor, with both asking, How can we go to a Canadian-style system when the private industry has gotten so "big...
...Clinton—why are we not surprised?—has gone even further, borrowing the Republican idea of actually feeding the private insurers by making it mandatory to buy their product...
...Not to mention all the people who are stuck in jobs they hate because they don't dare lose their current insurance...
...I'm not mean, though...
...This is extortion...
...Her website is www.barbaraehrenreich.com...
...The surrender-buzz is everywhere...
...That's how a doctor makes money...
...nor did the U.S.S.R...
...Note: The private health insurance industry is not big because it relentlessly seeks out new customers...
...Barbara Ehrenreich is the author of, most recently, "Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy...
...Leighton Ku, at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, gave me the figure of $776 billion in expenditures on private health insurance for this year...
...An estimated 18,000 Americans die every year because they can't afford or can't qualify for health insurance...
...Yes, it is big...
...So why does the U.S...
...With the courageous exception of Dennis Kucinich, the Democratic candidates have all rolled out health "reform" plans that represent total, Chamberlain-like appeasement...
...Unlike any other industry, this one grows by rejecting customers...
...The time has come to summon that old macho spirit and crush this enemy...
...If we had the kind of universal, single-payer, health insurance Kucinich is advocating, private health insurance workers would continue to be covered, even after they were laid off...
...Yet we faced down those "enemies" with patriotic bluster, vast military expenditures, and, in the case of Saddam, armed intervention...
...After facing down the Third Reich, the Japanese empire, the U.S.S.R, Manuel Noriega, and Saddam Hussein, the United States has met an enemy it dares not confront—the American private health insurance industry...
...It's not only the Democratic candidates who are capitulating...
...In fact, why call it "insurance," which normally embodies the notion of risk-sharing...
Vol. 71 • November 2007 • No. 11
