The Health Insurance Monopoly: Mandating purchase of an overpriced product from a corrupt system

[Better Believe It]

The Health Insurance Monopoly
by Bill Monkerud, CounterPunch
January 13th, 2010

Since 1998, over 400 mergers left two conglomerates in control of the huge health care insurance industry. Mergers allowed insurers to raise prices, buy influence in Congress, and redistribute cost savings to shareholders. Consolidation increased rapidly. Between 2004 and 2005, 28 health care mergers, valued at $53 billion, outpaced the number of health care mergers in the previous eight years combined.

Low interest rates, leverage and lax anti-trust enforcement by the Bush Administration allowed conglomerates to take control of the health insurance in the U.S. A 2009 report from Fortune Magazine reveals that the revenue of the top two companies account for $142 billion or 36 percent of the health care insurance market, while the top four gross $202 billion, almost three quarters of all health insurance.

A 2006 study by the AMA found that health insurance is “highly concentrated” in 94 percent of the states, and in a majority of the nation’s largest metropolitan areas a single insurer controlled more than half the business. A 2007 study by Health Care for America Now found that in 38 states, the top two insurers control 57 percent or more of the market, and in 15 states one insurer controlled 60 percent or more of the market.

“Although the overwhelming majority of the American people support it, there’s no public option, no end of the anti-trust exemption for the health insurance industry, no option for people over 55 to buy into Medicare, no ability of the government to negotiate drug prices or import cheaper drugs from Canada, and no real regulation of health insurance premiums,” said Zack Kaldveer, spokesman for the Consumer Federation of California. “Yet, Congress is mandating everyone to purchase an overpriced product from a corrupt system. If premiums continue to rise, we’ll be stuck wasting money on an unsustainable health care system.”

The insurance monopoly is pouring millions of dollars into creating misleading catchwords, carefully chosen to guide our opinions. Reforms are needed to protect consumers from a vast monopoly, slowly draining our paychecks into for-profit conglomerates. Without strict controls over these monopolies, we will be stuck with the same old predatory system.

Read the full article at:

http://www.consumercal.org/article.php?id=1175

[90-percent]

1. Health Care Debate

This whole painful year long cluster fuck has proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that America is of, by and for THE CORPORATIONS.

Citizens and voters - you have no representation in YOUR OWN government. The people you elected feel no obligation what so ever to do things in YOUR BEST INTERESTS.

Our government is squeezing working people more and more all the time, in service to MONOPOLISTIC CORPORATIONS. Makes you wonder when the tipping point is going to come. How much more of this are we all willing to take?

-90% jimmy

[Leopolds Ghost]

2. We've raised a generation of good little subjects.

[bvar22]

3. Less than 35% of ALL voters....

...support Mandates without a Public Option.

What does the Democratic Party Leadership expect to happen when they FORCE this hugely unpopular bill on America? :shrug:

Does the Democratic Party Leadership even care?

Who are these people working for?

[jtrockville]

4. "If premiums continue to rise".... Really? That's an "IF"?

Premiums are guaranteed to rise. The care provided in exchange for those premiums is guaranteed to decline. That's how insurance companies roll.

Why do we tie health care delivery to such a bizarre system?