If you haven't seen Michael Moore's film Sicko about how bad private insurance for health care really is, here is the confidential memo (.pdf) written by on blue Cross/Blue shield executive to tell you.
Essentially health insurers exist today to skim 25% or more off the top of all health insurance payments, then to deny paying benefits to save money for themselves. The insurers themselves provide no useful innovations that improve health care. They are simply a form of redirecting money from one pocket to another and collecting as much off the top as they can in the process. Medicare and the Veteran's administration have both demonstrated that they can do a much better job at sharply lower cost and still pay health care providers the going rates in their community.
Don't believe me? See Sicko.
Health care financing is one place the free market has failed. It is time to implement national single-payer health insurance in America. Remember, though. This is about financing health care benefits. It is NOT about making the health care suppliers into government employees.
A friend says he downloaded "Sicko" from bit torrent. Apparently a popular movie can be recognized when it has several hundred download seeding sites. Sicko has over 9,400 seeding sites, and 1,683 active sites actually downloading when checked. Not a misprint. Over nine thousand download sites.
Such downloading of movies is, of course, illegal. I point these numbers out to show the impact the movie has already had.
Addendum - 9:58 PM
It looks like "Sicko" is having a rapid and significant impact on Americans generally. See Sicko builds a movement.
I understand that "the theater lobby—at a Dallas, Texas suburban cineplex" mentioned in the article I referred to was in Arlington, TX. Arlington is far from the most liberal city in the otherwise extremely conservative Texas. It is, for example, the largest city in the United States with no public transportation at all, and has been the single city between the Dallas and Fort Worth which has repeatedly prevented a direct rail connection between those two cities. The voters there voted down funds to provide for flood control on Johnson Creek which runs through the center of the city - although they approved city sales tax financing to build a baseball stadium for George W. Bush's losing "Texas Rangers." They also approved the use of eminent domain to remove homeowners who wanted a fair price for their homes, so that the very wealthy and powerful men building the baseball stadium would have to pay too much. Then they gave the stadium to those wealthy people. Next, they did the same thing voting for for sales tax funding and eminent domain in order to build the new sports palace fir the super wealthy Jimmy Jones to hold his "Dallas" Cowboys football team.
Last week the rains overfilled Johnson Creek and flooded a large section of Arlington. Again. The wealthy Republicans who control Arlington could care less. They are getting their dollars from the peons. They can make a lot more money with a professional sports team than they can with building communities and providing health care for the peons. Especially if they can get the peons to approve sales taxes to pay the costs of fielding the sports teams. The peons can always get jobs parking cars or selling hot dogs at the stadiums - as long as their health holds out. No health insurance, of course.
Ain't America great? Anyone can become a multimillionaire owner of a professional sports team, and to Hell with everyone else.
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