The Main Purpose of the "Free Market" Economy is to "Connect Greedy Rich People to Other People's Money"

GUEST COMMENT

Why not? Because unregulated "free" market capitalism is extremely efficient.

Extremely efficient at connecting greedy rich people to other people's money.

What it's not so efficient at is connecting people who are willing to work with jobs that need to be done.

This is because "free" market capitalism can't easily put a dollar value on helping sick people or cleaning up the environment or educating children or any other social good. Since the value of these things is difficult to measure in dollars, the business jerks take the lazy way out and give them a value of zero.

They pose as Captains of Industry, Vigilant Stewards of Wealth and Wise Forecasters of the Market, but all they really are is IN THE WAY.

UNITY PROGRESS COMMENTARY
Very true and well stated.

Until you realize that the "free market" is never really free, and works only in limited ways and in limited circumstances, your economy is never going to amount to much by 21st century standards.

The above guest comment and Unity Progress comment in response were in response to this article at Common Dreams.

An Alternative to Slash and Burn Medicine

GUEST COMMENT

Thinking outside the box, this idea came to me. If anyone would like to add feedback, it would be appreciated.

Years ago when I read, "Inside Job: The Looting of America's Savings and Loans" the book made clear that people with about $100,000 in assets could start their own savings and loans knowing it would be federally insured. (Lots of unscrupulous sorts in fact did so and that led to the S & L Debacle.)

My question is what makes for a legitimate insurance company? What parameters must be hypothetically met?

The reason I raise that question is, what is to stop a large group of conscientious persons from creating their own insurance company/pool?

Today I enjoyed the once-a-month massage I treat myself to as part of MY health care plan. I've always felt that not smoking, eating a light diet with fish and no meat, getting exercise would constitute MY health plan. I know there are thousands, if not millions, who work to maintain good health and would NOT want the types of options this FORCED insurance would entail.

So the next thought that came to me was could some kind of umbrella group form consisting of: massage therapists, acupuncturists, nutritional therapists (particularly those oriented towards whole foods), natural-cure oriented doctors, chiropractors, etc and FOUND a holistic INSURANCE company. People would pay monthly dues and receive reduced costs on regularly scheduled "tune-ups." And then perhaps their insurance would also include an OPTIONAL tier that paid for catastrophic events.

I wonder if thousands or maybe millions would be interested in such a plan, more or less one that was based on "preventative strategies" with benefits? And I wonder what would make it a legitimate "insurer," one that offered treatment options outside the typical slash and burn that defines much of modern medicine as practiced in America today (given it also follows the Mars rules orientation).

I read that there were thousands of health insurance companies, and I also read that many people would be forced to purchase policies through them that would be essentially worthless. Is the government going to monitor each one and stamp it for viability or quality control in a business environment that already chases profit at the expense of allocating legitimate access to medical treatments for far too many?

There is a sizable portion of the US population that shops at holistic markets, eat organic/whole foods, takes preventative health care very seriously, and probably could constitute a large enough pool for such a creative, cutting edge form of insurance.

Anyone have any ideas? Heck, maybe OUR forum could provide the launch pad...

UNITY PROGRESS COMMENTARY
Well it’s a very good idea and I myself am very afraid of the slash and burn health treatments as you called them. There are bad incentives in the system for doctors to over test, over treat, and over medicate their patients.

Think of how great your idea would be in conjunction with single payer that you would automatically have as a citizen if we could defeat both the corporate Republicans and the corporate Democrats.

This is what the rest of the world enjoys: some variation of single payer basic coverage for everyone is the foundation, and then people are completely free to add on to that whatever else they want from the private profit making and the private non-profit sectors. And they are free within the foundation system to seek practitioners who forswear slash and burn medicine. And they are free to never see a doctor if they so choose. This is part of the good life that has been achieved only recently, historically speaking, in many countries throughout the world.

The above guest comment and Unity Progress comment in response were motivated by this article at Common Dreams.

Several Reports About Physicians Refusing to be Slaves of the Health Insurance Industry

Obama has lied about just about everything in the deform. Even for a politician, the number of lies Obama and his spokesmen tell is staggering.

Look what I found just now by sheer accident: an article reporting that physicians are more and more quitting and/or closing their private practices and instead becoming salaried physicians working directly for the government. The article reports that they are doing so due to too many hassles from the insurance companies and due to excessive malpractice insurance premiums (it seems that they are victims of a "one-two knockout punch" by the insurance industry as a whole.):

So whether or not these doctors are too right wing to understand that single payer is the only way to go, at least they are smart enough to remove themselves from the huge burdens imposed on them by the useless insurance industry.

Other articles with similar themes at CNN:

Doctors quitting the profession completely:

Doctors refusing to accept insurance payments:

(The related article website application is a nice one, isn't it?)

Finally, there is this one warning about how Medicare cuts could be devastating in 2010:

You know, actually it is an overstatement to say that the mainstream media never has anything useful to read.

The above was in response to this article.

Even the Government Thinks the Mandate will Very Possibly go the way of the Dodo Bird

I'm just glad there is at least one non-right wing place on the internet where there is overwhelming opposition to the mandate, which without public control of health care is quite literally fascism. The opposition at other non-right places is more nuanced and less overwhelming. But both the right and the hard right are furious, and overall opinion against the mandate is surprisingly high, in excess of 60%.

All of those in favor of the law are (I assume unwittingly) showing their ignorance of both macroeconomics and microeconomics. A book could be written to explain why and how this law violates laws of economics and why and how it will make things worse.

True, some people (besides the insurance company and health industry stakeholders) will benefit to a limited extent, but many more will be harmed by the new laws, which among their dozens of faults do NOT actually create a national health insurance or a national health care system or program.

With the little time I have here I want to mention a curious and very disturbing fact that I discovered which has flown under the radar: The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has officially predicted that only about 45-50% of those without insurance now and who will still not be eligible for Medicaid will comply with the mandate and buy the insurance. The rest will still be without insurance.

Thinking that CBO might be unrealistically high on their compliance estimate, I was actually surprised when I crunched numbers to deduce what the CBO compliance estimate actually is based on their publicly revealed still uninsured even after "reform" number, which is about 22 million one year after "reform" takes affect (2015). (I do not have the time these days to actually slog through CBO reports and I half thought they would not openly have what I was after in their reports anyway, so I simply did a quick economics projection and deduced what they are saying about compliance.)

So another reason this is an unprecedentedly bad law is that the government knows in advance that there will be mass non-compliance. I was thinking the government would be predicting a higher compliance percentage than me, but this is apparently not the case. It seems that roughly half of people who are supposed to comply with the mandate are not going to, according to the government itself. I mean come on, you have to do better than that, Democrats, if you want to with a straight face say you even tried to provide health care to the masses.

With sky high non-compliance numbers like those, the whole thing looks like it will devolve into an episode similar to what happened with prohibition. Whether the Republicans will actually repeal the mandate within the next 5-10 years, however, can not at the moment be predicted with any confidence one way or the other. But it does seem certain that the mandate with no "public option" at all and with totally lacking and ineffective cost controls and regulation will go the way of the dodo bird in 15-20 years and within 25 years at the very most. Within that time, the mandate will be dead either officially or, at the very least, unofficially, from any combination of numerous and obvious threats to it, just as prohibition was dead before the amendment was officially repealed.

The above was in response to this article.

Armed with the new Health Insurance Laws, the Rich Look Forward to Siphoning the Resources of the Non-Rich

Yes, the Hendrik Hertzberg article is snobbish, lame and irrelevant. It really is an embarrassment to journalists. It was published at a notorious redoubt of "old money": no one at "The New Yorker" really cares about lower income working (or unemployed) people.

Here are just a few clues (among dozens that exist) that the new health insurance laws are little more than a way for rich insurance executives, employees, and lobbyists to siphon the meager resources of poor people (which they are motivated to do given the largely collapsed economy):

--The net result is opposite in many respects to what Obama and the Democrats campaigned on.

--The Democrats failed to get one single Republican vote (unlike with Social Security, Medicare, etc.)

--Most of the new laws don't take effect until 2014 and the strong negative reactions to it won't happen until 2015-2017. 5-7 years is a very long time politically; this amount of time allows those who passed it to somewhat remove themselves from having to take responsibility for the failures. Some of those who passed the bad laws won't even be in office when the bills for it come due and when those negatively affected and those who thought they would benefit but who find out they don't benefit start crying the blues.

As I said these clues that the new laws are a sham and a racket for the insurance companies are just the tip of the iceberg, but even by themselves they tell you that there is something very, very wrong here.

There are some good aspects, like Medicaid expansion and a few new regulations on insurance that should have existed since the 1950's or so, but the law as a whole does more harm than good. Anyone who says the law does more good than harm does not understand macroeconomics or microeconomics (or does not think they are important). Both macro and micro economics tell you, after you study the laws and apply those disciplines, that the new laws will do more harm than good. Economics may not be perfect but what we are talking about are very basic, irrefutably important and long established as valid economics principles that are trashed by the new laws.

This whole episode is a textbook example of how way too many elite Americans are too greedy and too right wing to resist the temptation to trash the laws of economics in favor of laws that keep the rich rich and make the poor poorer. Europeans used to commonly have shortcomings like this: many decades or some centuries ago!

The above was in response to this article.

Laugh out Loud at Those Saying the new Health Insurance law is a Net Gain

In fact, this whole episode is a very disturbing revelation of how Americans who support these new laws are very, very ignorant of economics. I was just reading some comments at talkingpointsmemo.com. Here is a real gem:

ACTUAL COMMENT AT TALKING POINTS MEMO
"This is not true. First the exchanges guarantee competition and downward price pressure by incorporating insurance companies and nonprofit into competitive pools. Second from what level have the subsidies been lowered?
Making young and healthy people buy insurance will also drive down the cost. The fact that so many do not buy insurance now is one of the reasons it is so expensive, but I will not go into that right now."

Laugh out loud!

The insurance companies have to be "incorporated into competitive pools".

Laugh out loud extra big!

"Making young and healthy people buy insurance will also drive down the cost"

Laugh out loud extra big!

And the ultimate laugh out loud:

"The fact that so many do not buy insurance now is one of the reasons it is so expensive, but I will not go into that right now."

I mean seriously that was one of the funniest things I have seen in years. (Why couldn't this person not "go into it" right now? Maybe because what he said was bat squeeze crazy?)

But what is very, very disturbing is that the kind of rank and humorous economics ignorance shown by these comments to a large degree underlies the new laws themselves as well as the debate about them. I mean, the comments are seldom this ignorant and humorous, but every single pro law comment and article is ignoring or is ignorant of the laws of economics to one extent or another.

Americans think they are immune from the laws of economics, that they don't, for example, have to worry about things like percentage of the GDP sucked up by health care. ("Only the little countries worry about such things and only the little people pay taxes," laugh out loud.) But I am afraid that no one and nothing is immune from the laws of economics, and that Americans will continue to find out the hard way that they are not. In fact, anyone rooting for the American economy to collapse even more so than it already has should be in favor of the new health insurance laws.

The above was in response to this article at Common Dreams.

Unify or Become Fish Kill as Big Fishes in Small Ponds

GUEST COMMENT

Excellent article. But now what can I as an individual do? I've already written congressmen, the president, etc. I'm on Medicare; my wife is younger, healthy, unemployed and uninsured, so our problem is not as onerous as many other Americans'. What can I do to avoid writing a check to a private healthcare provider?

What method of tax resistance can I practice? What mode of civil disobedience would be effective? I've already clashed with many "authorities" who are part of what Amster points out as the American modus operandi:

"it is beyond peradventure that you cannot force people to be free, or liberate them at the point of a smart bomb, or impose democracy upon them. You can't turn people good by deploying practices of torture and punishment as a matter of standing policy. Enlightenment doesn't come from enslavement, and "arbeit macht frei" is nothing more than a cruel joke. Likewise, the health of the people will not be improved by forcing us to work for insurance companies that will continue their essential monopoly over our access to medical treatment."

The short list of suggestions doesn't take into account the tremendous effort I and people like me have already done in the way of community organization, street demonstrations, letter writing, etc. Amster's list, community-building, local organizing, people power, self-sufficiency, civil disobedience, nonviolent praxis, opting out, do-it-yourself ethics, mutual aid, positive thinking, holding a vision, creative interruption, highlighting exemplars, is all about difficult, time-consuming efforts. What can an individual do?

UNITY PROGRESS COMMENTS
An individual can't do squat in my honest opinion. That's why I keep wishing that non-right wing people can "un-niche" themselves from a zillion web sites and movements and organizations and unify into an umbrella political party / organization that could be marketed on a level playing field with the Democrats and Republicans. Like Solidarity in Poland or like New Democratic Party in Canada and so on and so forth.

In Europe, everyone knows it's all about unity, but not so in the US.

I mean, you can still be into those individual sites and organizations and little parties, you can still be that big fish in a small pond, but if you don't also unify with the millions of others, you aren't going to get very far at all in the big picture.

To oversimplify a little, the unification process is that an umbrella organization is founded and then the call goes out for the zillions of existing and futile organizations to pledge allegiance and support to the umbrella.

Unity equals progress, thus the name of my micro spec on the net:

The above guest comment and Unity Progress comment was in response to this excellent article.

One of the Very Best Articles of the Year

This will undoubtedly be one of the best articles of the year, made even better by all the nice links.

Enjoy this one because, within a couple of months, the health insurance thing will be considered a fait accompli, so articles about it will dry up. This "fade from view" has happened time and time again in the last 30 years as one bad law after another is passed. Once the bad law is passed, people are supposed to go on as if everything is fine and dandy, and many of them do.

I'm not leaving the topic for a minute, though.

You can't vote Democrat or Republican anymore, you need to start a new party, or at least settle for the Greens (who admittedly will never win a federal election due to being tagged as one issue, but it's better than nothing.)

The above was in response to this article at Common Dreams.