When Medi-Care Doesn't!

At this time of year we are subjected to ads and commercials advising us that Medicare open enrollment is now and it ends December 7^th. (Funny, that date sounds familiar for something. Hmmm.)

Those affected by this are naturally seniors and if lucky getting older every year while still under the protective arm of the Medicare system.

What the ads say however always annoys me to some extent.  They explain that you must compare plans and choose the one that’s right for you.  In other words the one blended specifically for that which ails you if you will.

You are told to do this by researching online and visiting various websites to compare costs and coverages.

The problem is that while many new seniors are in their mid sixties the majority of Medicare users are not.

The targeted audience is obviously those who have already been enrolled in Medicare. These people are less likely to be up on new technologies and less likely to have the skills needed to navigate the increasingly confusing internet.

So at a time in our lives that used to be pointed to as the Golden Years we are expected to spend more time perusing different health care plans all designed to confuse and hide certain facts so as to lure us into signing up for deals designed to make the insurer wealthier and drive customer crazy, or crazier after all these years.

Picture a ninety year old surfing the web and charting the available plans and you will realize how ripe for fraud the entire thing is!

This is all related to my next post (or actually the one I posted first so that it would appear below this and thus look as though it was in correct chronological order.)

Hopefully you read that one first but if not go back and read it again.

Free Lunch Anyone?

We all know, or at least should know that there is no such thing as a free lunch. So why do so many people continue to line up whenever someone offers one?

Because no matter how often we are hurt we want to believe that the next person will be good to us. It's in our nature to trust and hope for better times ahead.

That is why we listen to so-called experts many of whom are actually not experts but merely representatives of one side of a discussion.

We have a health care crisis now - RIGHT NOW - in America. And while it appears that there should only be two sides to the argument there are actually many. And every side has its champion. The problem is to weed out the self serving ones from the truly dedicated humanitarians.

Unfortunately we live in the real world and very few humanitarians are in power let alone in our Congress and when last I checked Mother Theresa was not one of them.

Understand that our Senators and Representatives in Congress (leaders from now on) all have their health care taken care of by us, the people and their futures are set. Neither they nor their heirs will want for anything. They have Social Security in the true sense of the term. We elected to give it to them.

This means that they actually don't give a damn whether or not you and I get health care or even live long enough to retire comfortably unless we live in a swing state. To them we are votes not people. Our leaders have so many buffers in place between themselves and their constituents that there is almost no possibility your request or complaint will be heard. Frankly they just don't have the time.

Our leaders do however have the time for free lunches!
'But you said there was no such thing?!?'
Well technically it is not free, we the people are paying for them.

We need a fix to our broken health care system and we need the leaders to get it done for us. But when they start to look at ways to repair it they come up against the groups determined to keep the status quo. This group has far more cash than do all the rest of us and in fact they even have our money, by obscene premiums and our bailout checks.

I am naturally speaking of the health insurance companies and the pharmaceutical companies and the doctors and the lawyers. These groups all have lobbyists on their payrolls and much of the money they spread around somehow finds itself in the pockets and stomachs of our leaders.

When was the last time you took your Senator out to lunch? Well that was the last time he or she felt obligated to help you out!

The Republicans and Conservatives - you remember them as the group that lost the last election - are playing fast and loose with our future and they are winning the battle. The so-called 'Blue Dog' Democrats, the ones who would not be too upset being Republican also seem intent on killing health care reform.

Just like the annoying advertisements that repeat the 800 number over and over again so that we cannot forget it so too are these friends of the Insurance companies repeating their lies.

One of the groups cited by the opposition to your healthy affordable future is the Lewin Group. One after another our leaders in Congress who oppose any change to the structure that gets insurance companies their huge profits tells us about a study by the Lewin Group. And surprisingly every one of the studies shows how bad any change to our health care system would be.
We will have to pay more.
We will get worse care.
We will be told when to die etc.
The one thing these studies don't point out is that THE LEWIN GROUP IS OWNED BY THE HEALTH CARE INDUSTRY!

Know thy enemy! Here is a statement by two of our enemies printed in that decidedly liberal paper, the Wall St. Journal (Owned by Rupert Murdoch of Fox fame.).

“The Lewin Group [is] the gold standard of independent, health-care analysis.” Senators Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Bob Bennett (R-UT) Wall Street Journal, June 26, 2007.

Now for the facts (From the Washington Post July 22, 2009):
The Lewin Group is part of Ingenix, a UnitedHealth subsidiary that was accused by the New York attorney general and the American Medical Association, a physician's group, of helping insurers shift medical expenses to consumers by distributing skewed data. Ingenix supplied its parent company and other insurers with data that allegedly understated the "usual and customary" doctor fees that insurers use to determine how much they will reimburse consumers for out-of-network care.

In January, UnitedHealth agreed to a $50 million settlement with the New York attorney general and a $350 million settlement with the AMA, covering conduct going back as far as 1994

In other words they are a fraud as are all the leaders who quote their findings such as smirking Eric Cantor R-VA or Orrin (shut your) Hatch R-UT and many others.

We must not be fooled by these criminals. We must not believe their lies. We must tell our leaders that we are on to them and that they have to get this broken health care system fixed.

Here is a partial list of Senators and the money they have been paid by the insurance companies to stop you and I from getting reform.

Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT)	$1,203,205
Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-NM)	$206,297
Sen. Kent Conrad (D-ND)	$442,165
Sen. Mike Enzi (R-NV)	$342,228
Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA)	$702,595
Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-ME)	$161,706

Surprisingly or not Senator Baucus who was given so much power by Harry Reid that he no longer has to answer to the Majority Leader is highest on the list! Harry Reid would appear to be a moron and who am I to argue with appearances?

Tell your congressman that we will no longer allow the deception and that for them there is no more free lunch!