Private Health Insurance Companies Increase Healthcare Costs and Reduce Care: End Them

But Frontline so skewed Reid's reporting that he refused to appear in the final product and says he won't work with Frontline in the future.

Not exactly. Based on the article...

"Frontline so skewed Reid's reporting that he refused to appear in the final product" is true.

That he "says he won't work with Frontline in the future" is also true.

However the sentence structure in this column also implies that "Frontline so skewed Reid's reporting that he says he won't work with them in the future" which is not quite what the original article says. The reason he won't work with Frontline in the future is because they won't hire him again, not because he necessarily refuses to do so.

The quote from the article explaining why his future projects will not be for Frontline is:

“Frontline will never touch me a again – they are done with me,” Reid said.

UPS, A Corporate Sponsor Of “The Contract On America,”  have an overseas shell corporation based in Bermuda, Overseas Partners Limited (OPL), whose sole purpose is avoidance of United States income taxes. The IRS won the largest back taxes judgment in history against them in the late 1990’s. The Bush administration dropped the case during the appeals process.

I was in management there for 12 years. They are not fans of organized labor. They are not fans of Democrats either. I was repeatedly informed by upper management that Democrats are a pale shade of the Communist Party.

 Their lobbying organization, UPSPAC, one of K Street’s biggest, gives overwhelmingly to Republicans. When I left UPS in 1992 I turned in testimony and documents that detailed their tactics of forcing supervisors and management into donating to UPSPAC. The Federal Elections Commission filed a charge against UPS, in which, after a four year legal battle UPS agreed to pay a fine and to never engage in this behavior again (never get caught again).

I turned over to the EEOC internal company documents that resulted in a sealed judgment against UPS for age discrimination.

I turned over to attorney David Mark of Seattle, Washington, documents that proved UPS was aware of tactics that resulted in employees being forced to work through their unpaid lunch hour. The documents proved that UPS was aware of these facts and were actually tracking the number of affected employees on a national level, in spite of years of legal testimony to the contrary. The case resulted in a multi million dollar judgment against the corporate entity.

UPS may be an authoritarian dinosaur in the business world, but they are extremely astute in avoiding bad press. In fact press clippings are gathered at a national and world wide level and studied with intent as to how to influence positive press coverage. It is no accident that one of the biggest contributors to National Public Radio is the Annie E. Casey Fund, is named after the daughter of UPS’s founder Jim Casey.

mike kohr
mkohr@dishmail.net

What has our government done, to convince people to hand over our very health freedoms for it to govern over?
Katrina……..?
Fannie Mae – bailout? (this is a government entity who's employee's receive bonuses!) What other government employee receives bonuses for doing their jobs?
Social security – bankrupt ? (robbed for other expenditures)
Medicaid – ? (robbed for other expenditures)
$2 trillion Porkulus bill - ? (and growing)
AIG – bail out, yet nobody knows where's the money gone? No committee of oversight in place (was promised by our representatives to be in place immediately)
Gas prices - ?(50% of every dollar at the pump goes to Washington) But who did you point your finger at as the problem????
Since our government "cannot" be sued, how will one be able to be recompensed for its malfeasance or neglect? How will the government, once it tells 300 million people "go see the doctor" we will pay all the bills, be able to control the consequences? By overwhelming our medical profession or break it, will come another grand government solution," we need more money to fix it"! You are already familiar and have accepted this excuse for too long, and know this to be their power solution. Our government has impoverished our families' financial freedom to pay our own way, by immoral taxation.

Furthermore how has Government run health care worked in other countries? Let's get past the emotions and examine the facts. A common example used to further the cause of "socialized medicine" in the United States is to point out how well it is working in countries such as France and Canada. However, those living in Canada know full well that their government run health care program is most certainly not working. As a matter of fact, many Canadian citizens choose to hire high priced brokers to find them quality health care right here in the United States because of the terrible bureaucracy that controls all forms of health care in Canada.

For more about what is really going on with the Canadian health care system please watch these short but very informative documentary videos:
http://www.freemarketcure.com/brainsurgery.php http://www.freemarketcure.com/twowomen.php http://www.freemarketcure.com/thelemon.php http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KiXT0P3edfs
The number of actual uninsured's in the US has also been grossly inflated as well. For the real numbers: http://www.freemarketcure.com/uninsuredinamerica.php
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aE-I0ombIEY&eurl=http://www.noinsuranceclub.com/blog.php&feature=player_embedded

Medical care in the United States is derided as miserable compared to health care systems in the rest of the developed world. Economists, government officials, insurers and academics alike are beating the drum for a far larger government role in health care. Much of the public assumes their arguments are sound because the calls for change are so ubiquitous and the topic so complex. However, before turning to government as the solution, some unheralded facts about America's health care system should be considered, says Scott W. Atlas, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and a professor at the Stanford University Medical Center.

Americans have better survival rates than Europeans for common cancers:

* Breast cancer mortality is 52 percent higher in Germany than in the United States, and 88 percent higher in the United Kingdom.
* Prostate cancer mortality is 604 percent higher in the United Kingdom and 457 percent higher in Norway.
* The mortality rate for colorectal cancer among British men and women is about 40 percent higher.

Americans have better access to treatment for chronic diseases than patients in other developed countries:

* Some 56 percent of Americans who could benefit are taking statins, which reduce cholesterol and protect against heart disease.
* By comparison, of those patients who could benefit from these drugs, only 36 percent of the Dutch, 29 percent of the Swiss, 26 percent of Germans, 23 percent of Britons and 17 percent of Italians receive them.

Lower income Americans are in better health than comparable Canadians:

* Twice as many American seniors with below-median incomes self-report "excellent" health compared to Canadian seniors (11.7 percent versus 5.8 percent).
* Conversely, white Canadian young adults with below-median incomes are 20 percent more likely than lower income Americans to describe their health as "fair or poor."

Americans spend less time waiting for care than patients in Canada and the United Kingdom:

* Canadian and British patients wait about twice as long -- sometimes more than a year -- to see a specialist, to have elective surgery like hip replacements or to get radiation treatment for cancer.
* All told, 827,429 people are waiting for some type of procedure in Canada.
* In England, nearly 1.8 million people are waiting for a hospital admission or outpatient treatment.

Source: Scott W. Atlas, "10 Surprising Facts About American Health Care," National Center for Policy Analysis, Brief Analysis No. 649, 3/24/09 http://www.ncpa.org/sub/dpd/index.php?Article_ID=17770

Because of how the Single Payer System is designed Canadian citizens have NO WHERE NEAR the choices that we as American citizens do. As a matter of fact, until very recently (2005) it was simply not possible for a Canadian citizen to pay for their own health care or to purchase private medical insurance that would "bump them up the long waiting list" for medical treatments. The reason Canadian citizens now have the right to do so (and it is still limited) is a direct result of long hard battles (many that are still being fought) that have been waged by brave Canadian citizens like Dr. Jacques Chaoulli who took his clients case all the way to the Canadian supreme court and won! Dr. Chaoulli (http://www.healthcoalition.ca/chaoulli.html) and his patient, George Zeliotis, launched their legal challenge to the Canadian government's monopolized healthcare system after waiting more than a year for hip-replacement surgery.

Canada's high court found for the plaintiffs and in doing so issued the following statement: "The evidence in this case shows that delays in the public healthcare system are widespread, and that, in some serious cases, patients die as a result of waiting lists for public healthcare. The evidence also demonstrates that the prohibition against private health insurance and its consequence of denying people vital healthcare result in physical and psychological suffering that meets a threshold test of seriousness." Furthermore, Justice Marie Deschamps said, "Many patients on non-urgent waiting lists are in pain and cannot fully enjoy any real quality of life. The right to life and to personal inviolability is therefore affected by the waiting times."

Furthermore, the Vancouver, British Columbia-based Fraser Institute which keeps track of Canadian waiting times for various medical procedures. According to the Fraser Institute's 14th annual edition of "Waiting Your Turn: Hospital Waiting Lists in Canada (2006)," total waiting time between referral from a general practitioner and treatment, averaged across all 12 specialties and 10 provinces surveyed, rose from 17.7 weeks in 2003 to 17.9 weeks in 2006. Depending on which Canadian province you live in, a simple MRI requires a wait between 7 and 33 weeks! Orthopedic surgery could require a wait of 14 weeks for a referral from a general practitioner to the specialist and then another 24 weeks from the specialist to treatment! For even more real life horror stories about Canadian citizens left in the lurch by the Canadian healthcare system read the well researched and fact based Wall Street Journal article entitled "Too Old For Hip Surgery" here: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123413701032661445.html?mod=article-outset-box This is what happens when you put government in control of your health care decisions. Doing so in this country, would be nothing short of a train wreck. Anyone who thinks otherwise is simply uninformed or "willfully ignorant".

Real healthcare reform can be accomplished through consumer education, weeding out abuse of existing Federal entitlement programs (via a legitimate needs assessment) and continued funding of State sponsored Risk Pools so that people who are declined for insurance have an affordable option to continue coverage if declined on the individual major medical market. Following these few simple steps will go a long way towards not only maintaining our current health care system, but also towards keeping the bulk of our nations risk where it belongs, namely with the private health insurance sector. In light of the recent multi Trillion Dollar "Bail Outs" and many other failing corporations coming to the table with their hats in their hands (and their private jets on the tarmac) the last thing our government should do is start cutting more blind "bail out" checks in an effort to "reform" the U.S. health care system.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/07/opinion/07tue1.html

There were 299 posted comments.
Here are excerpts from my own - #20 and #188

"Why is employer-provided health insurance coverage taken as a given? Corporations in countries with government paid health care have a competitive advantage over those in the U.S. Why is U.S. business not in favor of changing this system?

Most of us know by now that the U. S. has the worst health care system in the industrial world. We have the highest percentage of people with no insurance, we have the highest costs, and the worst outcomes. Meanwhile the politicians dither and argue and try to see their way to not change the system too much, to protect vested interests at the expense of the public's health.

Our health care financing system is an expensive and unjust mess and a national disgrace. If the private sector can be part of the solution rather than a huge part of the problem that's fine. But send the health insurance and drug company lobbyists home and let the Congress and the Obama administration consult with the people and come up with plans to bring the U. S. into the 21st century."

Most commenters said the same.
"What's scary is that our voices are not being heeded in Washington. The chattering classes - from pundits to politicians to lobbyists - are talking only to themselves. Those narrow interests "know" that single-payer "won't work."

Are we getting angry out here in Massachusetts and Texas and New Mexico and Alabama and California? You bet. Where's democracy when the demos (people) are not heard?"

We can't take "no" for an answer. It is up to us. We can't let "Frontline" or any other media or so-called "authorities" censor the story. Bravo to T. R. Reid for standing up to them.

Colleen Clark
Cambridge, MA