Thunderhead

Competition: The Missing Link in a Monopolized Health Insurance Market

By Pete Stapp

pstapp56@gmail.com

Competition, essential to economists from Adam Smith to Milton Friedman, is now portrayed, through blustering media repetition, as a radicalized Bolshevik notion since it comes to a monopolized health insurance market by means of public option--by government—the only entity large enough to compete with monopolization. Yet the industry begs, by policies harmful to its customers, for competition.

 Monopolized markets, privately run for-profit, can deliver neither health care, nor news.

 In the Congress, a hidebound Republican Party is frog-walking conservative democrats away from single-payer policies which would bring competition to the health insurance marketplace.

 Yet the Transition Report on Competition Policy compiled by the American Antitrust Institute states: that “…competition is the preferred regulator of business behavior.” The conclusion is undeniable: competition lowers costs. Competition causes expansion in industrial-policy variation. Competition is the market’s invisible hand and bailouts directed to financial cartels are tantamount to the admission that Congress, over several administrations, failed to maintain competitive markets.

 FDR used to claim there were no accidents in politics. For failure to properly regulate commerce, members of Congress will simply claim it was not their intention. Yet the aggregate of coincidence points to legislative intent, folks. Therefore, one need only look at Congress’ PAC funding to see.

 The Senate Finance Committee could move to lower health care costs by initiating repeal of anti-competitive legislation like the McCarran-Ferguson Act which would open the health insurance cartel to antitrust enforcement. Instead, competition is inhibited in order to support existing monopolistic and cartel formations.

 Thus the Finance Committee’s policy-making elite snubs the practicality of enacting measures against anti-competitive practices while openly relying upon the continued abandonment of federal antitrust enforcement--both which further the erosion of competition. It also ensures that the industry’s captive customer base undergoes additional harm from systematic denial of vital medical services in support of corporate/investor profits.

 While competition is the health of our economic system, well established corporations will naturally collude to eliminate it by simple self-interest and is why constant vigilance by Congress is required.

 It is not true that free markets self-regulate; unrestrained, undisciplined markets are deregulated markets that hinder rivalry and rush toward monopolization—toward anti-business and the brute-force application of corporate economic might alone--wiping out competition and consumer choice along a dangerous trail of fraud and deceit. Government, the necessary evil, provides the proper restraint, discipline, regulation and enforcement which makes an economy work for everyone, the poor, the middle-class, and the wealthy.

 The Senate Finance Committee cannot act to lower health care costs without inflicting the industry with genuine competition. And it refuses to do so. Thus the Senate seditiously maintains a predatory health insurance market.

 The 60 member democratic majority is, in part, complicit with the shrinking ranks of the republicans in forging a “no-changes” health care bill unpalatable to the public. Many in the Senate simply care mostly about the relationships they’ve forged with large corporations. Their word, commitment and pride, are vested in those who pay to get them elected and re-elected.

 Congress’ historical failure to maintain market competition has left us to deal with the wretched truth of their policies—that the exertion of extraordinary corporate influence on congress is the most fundamentally obvious example of conflict of interest anywhere. Powerful corporate lobbying practices subordinate the most fundamental act of citizenship to artificial business mechanisms that can never be citizens. This is what happens when congress understands the natural human weakness to accept bribery then sanctifies it with legality.

 Such weakness is amplified in current members of Congress, who, as knowing adults willfully place Americans under the heel of a new kind of anti-competitive power—one completely alienating to our Constitution, our Republic and its Democracy.

Portions of Pete Stapp's article on competition were published in the Opinion section of the Greeley Tribune on August 27, 2009.

PSA: Essential Hospitalization Question to Ask of Physicians and Clinics

By Pete Stapp

It is possible to exercise good citizenship in the health care fields.

In most cases, before you allow yourself to be admitted to a hospital for treatment, ask your physician if he or she or the clinic they work for, has a stakeholder/ownership interest in the particular hospital or treatment center. Be sure you ask your physician directly and do not take "Well, I'm not sure, I'll have to look into that." for an answer.

• In doing this you are assuring yourself against potential conflicts of interest involved in the diagnosis and treatment of your condition.
• You protect your physician against possible violations of medical ethics as a conflict of interest of this nature implies a less than complete focus on the patient from diagnosis on down to practical patient care.
• You, as a consumer of medical services have put your physician (and the clinic, if there is one) on notice that there is a growing public intolerance, as well as an acute increase of awareness for unethical profit-taking in medicine.
• By asking this simple question before admission for treatment, you also inform your physician(s) that conflicts of interest of this nature are not difficult to root out and expose.
• You help bring about changes in policy where the clinic ceases admission practices to hospitals they hold financial stakes in. Or, it eventually leads to disinvestment, which eliminates the conflict of interest involved in this kind of patient treatment.

Senate Finance Commitee's Health Bill Promotes Civil Inequalities

Guest Opinion

By Jane Paudaux

http://www.Greeleyville.blogspot.com

Now health care has become an extension of the institution of insurance. The idea that people, when sick, should be tended and looked after to be made well again simply because they are a fellow human being has fallen by the wayside. Senator Max Baucus' finance bill wanted every person who could not pay for health care insurance to pay $3,800. as a fine for not participating in the good enrichment of society. The moral assumption reads "If you can't pay to stay alive then obviously your not worth keeping around." 

Prisoners on death row get public paid health care. People who get minimum wage get the death sentence. Great idea Senator Baucus. When people are allowed to go homestead a piece of land, cut down their own trees, plant their own vegetables, and not be fined for doing so then maybe, just maybe, it makes sense to force people with little economic means in the first place to pay to participate in the great Baucus society twisted out of the one LBJonce stood over. At least they won't have to lose their homes or go without groceries to make you feel secure in your gilded mansions at night. Or is the general idea here to enslave or outlaw people without means? Can we make the ugliness we don't like to look at go away like the unwanted bags under our eyes? Can we simply pay for someone to make everything look good on the surface and ignore the reality of the situation?

This is what frightens me the most about present-day America. Watching the powerful in the Congress and the Obama Administration who seemingly think that coming up with $3,800 is within every person's means. What happens to a nation when its leaders become so out of touch with the workers that actually make the infrastructure of the system go round? 

In my world Senator Baucus should have been embarrassed to even whisper such a proposal behind closed doors. We take out public servants who admit to canoodling with lobbyists in the bedroom but we leave in those who would loosen the Hound of the Baskervilles onto the throats of good honest hard working people who have less accumulated wealth. We care about the boundaries and civilities of sex and marriage but not ALL the people those marriages produce. Simply because the poor are asking to have a stake and share in the essentials that society demands BEFORE a person can be a fully fledged participant in the economy, of the rich and wealthy, we are to be fined. 

Of course that is only if President Obama manages to get his way and there is some type of viable public option. Which is what the Senate Finance bill is looking to ensure doesn't happen. Senator Baucus is going to make absolute sure that the unworthy, meaning those without accumulated wealth, will suffer some type of second class citizenship if the "Have's" will be footing any part of the bill. 

Suddenly I don't need to be walking inside a Castle in the Rhineland to get a feel for what it was like to be medieval peasantry. I can get it all right here in America in 2009. If health care has become a requirement to participate in the education system, to get a decent job, to be allowed to board public transportation, and just to be treated civil in society then society needs to make health care readily available to everyone they expect to participate. If not then the poor should be allowed to stake out a living space where ever they please without fines and stigma. A street corner, under bridges, in tent cities, where ever they can survive. Participation in society is already not optionable. Does it also have to come with a fine for not being able to afford membership dues when a person is being actively excluded on many levels from full participation? It doesn't make sense unless we go back to an agrarian society where Senator Baucus can have his own fiefdom. The only marker of a decent man or woman is not the property he or she owns Senator. 

As an alternative we could just put every one making less than a living wage in America on a bus and send them to Canada. It would make governing so much easier for the insurance-controlled Congressional elite. At least Canada has a sense of humanity toward their own even if they would turn the buses away. America used to be the champion of humanitarianism throughout the world. How low we have sunk that we can't even champion our own.

A poor person cannot create their own economy of scale to lower costs. Nor can individuals without many resources easily organize political power for their own benefit. Poor people have little representation in Congress because they cannot pay for the election campaign and often, strangely, they suffer from roadblocks on the way to polling. Not to mention that Congress, the Senate the House Richie-Rich built, is heavily invested in the industries which make a lot of their wealth from the backs of the poor. Businesses, banks especially, earn a large bulk of their wealth and profit by charging the poor excessive fees, surcharges, andusury interest rates. Good credit has also become a need. Try having a health care crisis and keeping your stellar credit rating. It has brought more than one middle class Joe into the sewers with the unwashed masses. In many jobs there are so many qualified applicants that the employers screen out those with health care issues and those with poor credit. The public education system has been repeatedly raped by financial conservatives over the past three decades so it can produce only the minimal cloned workers from the masses entering the system. Higher education has become increasingly more and more difficult to access.

In short, the competition for the higher status in society, is being systematically eliminated.Capitalism is all about competition and so is the innate shadow self of humankind. Check-mate goes to the wealthy elite and the others in this country whom they have managed to convince that government is never a good thing and thus to vote against their own self-interests. 

Left unchecked, both of these mechanisms, bring out cycles of destruction which the world has seen before. Let's just hope we are not doomed to repeat our mistakes of ego.

President Obama is right to make health care a moral argument. The problem still remains that he needs to let us know which side of the moral ideology he is keeping tune with rather than vaguely chastizing both ends of the spectrum. One end has all the power Mr. President and the other end has most of the day to day burdens and consequences. If the Senate Finance Committee doesn't come up with a plan for all the people please don't just send them back to their room without dinner. Publically expose their strategic posturing for what it really is--grotesque, devisive, and a fuedal elitism designed to reappoint and legitimize through the hands of government a second class citizenship for the peasants in America and a ruling first-class citizenship for the insurance industry, corporate monopolies, and the blue blood. Let them hang for social canoodling regardless whether a Republican, a Democrat, or a Republican in Democratic fuedal drag. 

Let's just hope he gets a bill in front of him that can knit this nation of opposing forces and ideologies together for another two hundred years. Then President Obama will have done his job well, in my view, and delivered full value on his own obligation to society. 

--
Posted By Jane Paudaux to GREELEYVILLE by Jane Paudaux at 9/11/2009 04:12:00 AM

Reply

Forward

Invite Jane Paudaux to chat

A Speech for Congress: Bare Knuckle Democrats. Now!

By Pete Stapp - Sep 8th, 2009 at 1:54 pm EDT

Also listed in: Action Wire | greeley for barack obama

Special Attention: Democratic Congressional delegation:

Despite being stricken with polio and confined to a wheelchair, President Franklin D. Roosevelt was a bare-knuckle democrat. He never backed down to the opposition who fought to create an autocratic economy. He did not compromise in addressing the necessities that defined his times. And his unselfish accomplishments resulted in a stronger constitutional republic, in a stronger democracy. It was not easy, but with the majority of US citizens behind him, we overcame powerful economic forces aligned to inject the population with fear, to incite the violence of division, and to deepen the Great Depression; to bury citizenship and basic human dignity in the pits of poverty and despair.

FDR was a bare-knuckle democrat because he was fearless.

Fear has never been the motivating ally of a free people. Fear has long been, and shall continue to be, the essential element in the disintegration of nations. Yet today, as members of the democratic coalition in the US House of Representatives and the Senate, your likely capitulation on the health insurance bill reeks of fear. Once the battle lines were drawn on reforming our currently monopolized health insurance market and after riding the coat-tails of a popular presidential candidate for your seat in Congress, you cut and ran the moment the heat was on.

Your anticipated desertion now, as corporate monopoly democrats on the most vital domestic issue of our time, flies in the face of the mandate for change resulting from the national election. It reveals a timid and calculating, handwringing nature unfit to govern or represent a free people. And it tells the voting public where you will be on the next controversial issue--voting "no" along with your republican colleagues who were soundly defeated in the last two election cycles.

Perhaps you have not noticed, but we are in crisis. We must act.

Recently the Inspector General of the United States declared the health insurance industry a monopoly—corporate entities with exclusive control over price and supply, shirking competition and denying consumer choice—clearly unsustainable. A public option in health insurance is our mechanism for monopoly busting as it alone inflicts the monopolized market with competition. The government is the only entity powerful enough to overcome the high barriers to entry common in the industry. 

But when our corporate monopoly democrats vote “no” on the public option—arm in arm with the republicans who do not represent the public on a single domestic economic issue--it will bring about the unwarranted consequences of perpetuating a no-competition economic environment in which rapacious monopolistic practices can grow unrestrained. Your negative vote on a public option in Congress, your vacating comprehensive health care reform, and your willful negligence in maintaining competitive markets and proper regulation of commerce, will punctuate a future stress-filled era of legally clever shell-games by the health insurance industry to dissolve rightful options in personal medical choice along with hidden fees, double-digit premium increases, poorer service, higher co-pays, rescission policies. You know the drill.

 As corporate monopoly democrats, your indenture to demanding autocratic masters in the corporate world raises  implicitly, the question whether your personal servitude to big money renders you free enough to make decisions about the public well being. In contrast to the late Senator Edward Kennedy, you seem disempowered in your most fundamental obligation to the citizens of the United States.

Your acceptance and dependence upon legalized bribery, however, has empowered you, through the health insurance industry, to create a masterpiece of autocratic non-accountability in the marketplace and within it, the deadly ruthless exploitation of health insurance customers. The pouring forth of this alienating corporate power on the citizens of the United States is a demonstration of congressional contempt for the plain ordinary hard work done by millions of citizens--the hard work that built the world's greatest economy. The thought that a democratic majority would allow the incomes of American citizens to be plundered by organized raiders in the corporate world is intolerable. Thus an enduring public need exists for you to demonstrate that you are not the legislative chattel of large corporations; that you are independent enough to write legislation for a free and independent people.

In the meantime, your likely “no” vote on an effective public option will default to the health insurance monopoly several additional unneeded favors:

 It will give the health insurance cartel a captive customer base to free it from competition--competition being the essence of good business and the most benevolent economic cure to a monopolized market. Competition …”off the table?” By your sustained opposition to reform and as a true servant of corporate monopolization of markets, you will also award the health insurance cartel predetermined financial gains—gains gotten without competition, without being earned. As a statistical unit of profit, citizens will be funneled into the purchase of health insurance from a disabled market--an ill effect of anticompetitive practices, which you, in the US Congress knowingly yet unaccountably, allow to proliferate.

Folks, power divided is our friend. The negative votes of corporate monopoly democrats  on health insurance reform will consolidate more corporate power. It will encourage the growth of monopolized markets in related medical fields. That means more monopoly control over government--autocratic, authoritarian and undemocratic. It means practicable economic policies framed just for a theoretical monetary world where only monopolies can thrive; the fabrication of economic nonesense to serve the monolithic interests of this kind of power will render the Constitution of the United States completely inert. And it follows inexorably that we will experience tremendous official contempt for we the people, for the rights-possessing citizen—the true unit and essence of constitutional democracy.

Despite the delusional madness of the carpet-biting right in the media and at recent town hall meetings, republican representatives might want to draw their line of monopolistic support somewhere short of infinity. Like conservative democrats, the Republican Party has no particular business supporting monopolistic movements either while boasting, falsely, as champion advocate for small businesses--whom they persistently threw under the bus when they had a strong congressional majority under Bush.  

It is also wrong, if not politically tragic, for well-financed republican factions to act out the illusion that fundamental change has not taken place in the American temper about our monopolized health insurance market. It is impossible for any party or faction to ramrod status quo rigor mortis down the public’s throat without serious damage in 2010. In the larger narrative, and as a radicalized and intemperate faction of a once respectable Republican Party, you’ve lost heavily in the last two election cycles. A third loss would be unprecedented. Do something new. Rediscover your role within a constitutional republic with democratic institutions. Your attempts to move beyond these time-tested civilized parameters put you, historically, in bad company. 

The United States of America is no Wiemar Republic. Do not tread on us.

 FDR warned us not to fear doing the right thing. Rather, we should resist the feelings of fear that paralyze action and make us into cowards unable to prevail against opposition, weak or strong. 

Mail to a Friend | Link | Comments (0) | Report Objectionable Content

Mail to a Friend | Link | Comments (0) | Report Objectionable Content