Financially Stupid People Are Everywhere by Jason Kelly

Author:Jason Kelly
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Published: 2010-04-28T04:00:00+00:00

Disinformation

Unfortunately, disinformation has been part of America’s corporate health care game plan for a long time. In 2006, AARP, the nonpartisan group for people age 50 and over, looked into who was behind some of the health care disinformation going to elderly Americans. Bill Hogan wrote in AARP Bulletin Today7 about three groups: United Seniors Association, The Seniors Coalition, and the 60 Plus Association. “More than ever before, they’ve been trying to influence political campaigns and shape policies that affect older Americans,” he found. “But who’s really behind these organizations? And are they really working to help older Americans?”

Come to find out, the pharmaceutical industry bank-rolled all three. To defeat prescription drug legislation at the state level, it used the 60 Plus Association as its front group. Hogan wrote, “Among other things, it hired Bonner & Associates, a Washington-based firm that specializes in ‘Astroturf lobbying’—so named because it’s the ‘artificial’ version of grassroots lobbying—to fight such legislation in Minnesota and New Mexico. The firm’s paid callers, reading from scripts that identified them as representatives of 60 Plus, urged residents to ask their governors to veto the legislation. Pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, Inc., later said it had paid Bonner & Associates to make the calls.”

Frank Clemente, the director of Public Citizen’s Congress Watch, told Hogan, “I think of the pharmaceutical industry as being like an octopus, with a deep reach no other industry can match. This is an industry that’s not only spending more on direct lobbying than any other industry but also spending more on front groups and related entities than any other industry.”

Right there with it is the health insurance industry. Its lobby, America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), panicked in summer 2009 when Congress began discussing a Medicare-like program for all citizens. As you know by now, such a program’s low costs would have forced private insurance companies to cut back on profits to remain competitive. Why, it could have even forced more money into caring for policy holders instead of paying executive bonuses and fueling corporate jets, a change of plan that was simply unacceptable. So, AHIP contributed to the astroturf campaign by organizing some 50,000 employees of the insurance industry to storm town hall meetings and oppose any public plan.

Preexisting Condition

The following excerpt comes from the October 28, 2009, episode of The Colbert Report, with Stephen Colbert.

The fact is, folks, we all have something. Maybe you’ve got a flawed aorta that didn’t show up on the EKG, or a genetic predisposition for horking down bacon. For insurance companies, we might as well be subprime mortgages. So, I say, don’t blame the insurers, folks....

So, if insurance companies are going to cover all people, first we’re going to have to start making people without preexisting conditions, by breeding the insurable with the insurable.... Now, remember folks, selective breeding and genetic modification have worked miracles for our fruits, vegetables, and livestock.

So, if you are a healthy woman who qualifies for insurance, let’s mate you with one of the few men we know an insurance company would never deny coverage to: their CEO.

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