Well…looking outside and seeing it snowing has made me depressed so I thought I might just as well get into something else that depresses me….the shenanigans that the insurance companies are starting in response to the ACA….while before they could use pre-existing conditions to screw over people…now they have to get more creative to screw people over…just like when it was exposed that every major insurer had whole departments whose sole purpose was to deny claims. Now, they are trying some new stuff…like sending letters to people whose policies are granfathered under the law saying they have to cancel and choose a new policy…and then only offering them plans that are many times more than what they were paying while making sure they never mention the exchanges where they have to compete on price….or the short sighted ploy of leaving a state completely so they don’t have to compete on price and the collusion that comes with it…where more than one company leaves a market to ensure there is only one or two companies left to compete so they can raise the prices and feed at the government trough with the subsidies that are available to the individual purchaser. I do feel good that the conversation has started to come back to single payer, Medicare for all to cut these damn crooks out of the gravy train…maybe we should root for the law to fail so we can take the house back and then get single payer…geez…
Tag Archives: Insurance industry
The Dems got played…
Well… this is going to be a short one but it is a thought I’ve had for a while and wanted to pass along…if you remember in the last election cycle, some of the insurance industry’s biggies supported dems since they could see that they were going to win control of the congress and if they were going to keep their promise to tackle healthcare, they wanted a seat at the table. They did buy that seat at the table and what that got them was the bastardized healthcare bill that had one great requirement that they lobbied hard for…that everyone will have to buy insurance from them. Once they got that little gem…they are now funding Repubs exclusively since they now want them to repeal the parts of the law that they had to swallow to get their individual mandate. Now, if the repubs take control you can bet that the insurance folks will lobby to keep the mandate but will get their way again when it comes to covering pre-existing conditions and the cost controls that are part of the bill. I have to hand it to them for playing the long con here…but we can take their victory away by keeping control of one of the houses of Congress in the dems hands and then moving to the government option that will take the insurance industry and their thousands of lobbyists out of the equation. It’s not that hard folks…just get out and vote…geez…
The Michigan Insurance industry wins again….
Well…Michigan residents got another slap in the face from the Michigan supreme court last week when they ruled that insurance companies can use credit scoring to help set rates for the insurance they sell here. I know they have statistics that show that people with higher credit scores cost them less in claims and thus should pay less…but I’m sure that if they looked at height, hair color, or weight, there would be a correlation there, too. I probably should correct something I said earlier, too…it’s not that those with higher credit scores will pay less…no,no,no…it’s that those with lower scores now will pay more…the rates will never go down for anyone.
If you are not from Michigan, you wouldn’t know that the insurance industry here has basically bought and paid for the decisions in the Supreme court since we have elected judges, along with buying the repub controlled senate to get whatever they need in the form of rate hikes and sweetheart laws. This last one hits just when another article in the paper this morning noted that credit scores in general have taken the largest downturn since they were invented due to the severity of the recession. So, through no fault of their own, and in no relation to the risk that the insurance companies have to bear, millions of Americans will now have their insurance costs raised just to give more profit to these companies.
When are we going to wake up and stop this kind of thing? When are the repubs going to start siding with the people over their business cronies? Geez….