Subject: [big campaign] New Huff Post from Creamer -- If the Insurance Companies Win, We Lose
From: [email-masked]
To: [email-masked], [email-masked]
Date: Thu, 1 Oct 2009 10:48:18 EDT
List-Id: <bigcampaign.googlegroups.com>

If the Insurance Companies Win, We  Lose 

As the health care  debate rages, one thing has become increasingly clear.  
This battle is not mainly some academic  argument about the best approaches 
to health care policy – or even a clash of  ideological world views.  It is 
a  fight over who gets what.  It is a  battle between the health insurance 
industry and the rest of us – as consumers,  as patients, as taxpayers.  
And one thing about this  conflict is certain: if the insurance companies 
win, we lose.   
Fundamentally, the big  insurance companies are fighting tooth and nail to 
make sure they can continue  to skim billions off the top of the dollars we 
spend on health care.   
This does not mean  that if we win, the insurance companies will lose in 
some existential  sense.  If real health insurance  reform – with a strong 
public option – is signed into law this fall, we won’t  have to have a tag day 
or bake sale for the big health insurers.  They are very good at figuring 
out how  to make lots of money.  
What is at stake is  whether we continue to be the world’s greatest health 
care chumps – paying 50%  more per person for health care and still being 
37th in the world in  health care outcomes.  More  importantly, what is at 
stake is whether the rapacious drive of big health  insurance companies to skim 
off money for Wall Street investors and their  corporate CEO’s will 
continue to create health care  victims. 
Take Stacie  Ritter.  She’s a mother of twins who  lives in Pennsylvania. 
Both of her daughters,  now 11, were diagnosed with leukemia when they were 
four.  They both needed stem cell transplants  and other cancer treatments. 
 They  did survive, but the treatments damaged the glands that control 
their growth  beyond repair.  Their doctors  indicated that in order for them to 
continue to grow normally, they needed  regular growth-hormone injections. 
But there was a  problem. Each time Stacie took her daughter to the doctor 
for shots, it cost her  $440. CIGNA refused to pay.  
Stacie and her husband  were not about to deny their daughters the right to 
grow up, so they spent every  spare dollar on the injections.  In  the end, 
those expenses – coupled with other costs they had to pay for the  twins’ 
cancer treatment – forced them to declare bankruptcy.   
Their story is  not unusual. Sixty-two percent of all bankruptcies are 
caused by medical bills  -- and often when an insurance company denies care. 
People think they are doing  the responsible thing for their families.  They 
have health insurance, but then a tragic illness hits and they lose  
everything anyway. 
CIGNA didn’t refuse to  pay for the kids’ hormone injections because it 
hates kids, or wanted the twins  to stop growing.  It denied the  shots 
because its principle mission has nothing to do with those kids’ health.  It is 
making money. 
Ed Hanway, CIGNA’s  CEO, can tell you about that.  In  2008, Ed made $12.2 
million.  That’s  $5,883 an hour.  Ed makes more in one day than the  
average worker makes all year long.  He makes 30 times more than the President of 
the United  States.    
Ed makes enough each  day to cover 106 of those shots.   
And for CIGNA, the  case of Stacie’s twins was not unusual.   
Doctors said a liver  transplant could save Nataline Sarkisyan’s life.  But 
CIGNA wouldn’t pay for that  either.  Nataline died in 2007, just  before 
Christmas.  She was 17.   
That same year, CIGNA  CEO Ed Hanway locked in a $73 million golden 
parachute for his  retirement. 
The average transplant  operation costs about $250,000.  Hanway’s golden 
parachute would pay for 292 liver transplants.  Nataline only needed  one. 
Hanway has a number of  homes, including a beach house in New  Jersey worth 
$13 million.  Many ordinary Americans are losing their  only homes each 
year because of medical bankruptcy.   
Of course Hanway is  not the exception, he’s the rule.  Stephen Hemsley is 
the CEO of UnitedHealth.  In 2009 Hemsley will make an astonishing  amount 
of money from his stock options and other remuneration --  $128,000,000.   As 
you might  imagine, he has a very nice house too. 
People like Hanway and  Hemsley don’t provide one iota of health care to 
anyone.  They have simply figured out a way to  route billions of our health 
care dollars through the companies that they  control so they can skim some 
off the top before it is used to pay for doctors  and hospitals.  
The incentives created  by this system also produced Staci’s bankruptcy and 
Nataline’s death. These  companies hire armies of bureaucrats whose only 
mission is to deny claims in  order to fatten corporate bottom lines. The only 
relationship those armies of  bureaucrats have with health care is that 
what they are employed to do is,  itself, sick. 
We’re approaching key  decision moments in the health care war.  Don’t sit 
on the side lines.  This battle is about each of us.  Any one of us could 
be Stacie or Nataline.  Ask your Member of Congress if he or she  lines up 
with us, or the insurance companies. Demand to know which side he’s on.  This 
time they can’t have it both ways, because if the insurance companies win,  
we lose. 
Robert Creamer is a long  time political organizer and strategist, and 
author of the recent book:  Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can  Win, 
available on _Amazon.com._ 
(http://www.amazon.com/Listen-Your-Mother-Straight-Progressives/dp/0979585295/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1213241439&sr=8-1)

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