Another day, another town hall meeting, another angry mob of right-wing fanatics promoting lies and trying to shout down democratic discourse.
Rep. Mike Thompson (D-CA) was just one of many Democratic members of Congress to be descended upon by the angry right-wing hordes, demanding, well, nothing essentially, aside from our current broken health care system. Yet at this rally something about their chants was rather revealing:
Speaking in a packed church, Thompson and other speakers were met by shouts of \”This is America!\” and \”What\’s wrong with profit?\” as they also tried to answer questions from supporters and critics in the audience.
Isn\’t it refreshing to hear from struggling American families, concerned about the health care debate, coming out and loudly voicing their support of…insurance company profits??
Well if \”Up with corporate mega-profits! Down with universal health care!\” doesn\’t scream \”grassroots populism\”, I don\’t know what does.
If I\’ve said it once, I\’ve said it a thousand times: How stupid do these people think we are??
This isn\’t populism, this isn\’t concerned citizens fighting for their rights, this is stagecraft. As my colleague Bill Scher wrote this morning, Only A Lobbyist-Funded Mob Would Chant \”What\’s Wrong With Profit?\”
And that is exactly what this is. These are ordinary citizens who have been co-opted by insurance lobby front groups to demand more profit for these corporations and their CEOs, at the expense of, THEMSELVES!
Take any economic or social theory about rational actors and throw it out the window. Actually, no, the theories still hold, because they are all based on a naive assumption of actors receiving and making decisions based on \”perfect information\”. In this case, to put it lightly, they have been stuffed full of blatant lies. So to be fair, these people are acting \”rationally\”, but only rational relative to the completely manufactured reality promoted by the insurance lobby, conservative politicians, and right-wing media.
In this case one of the main lobbying groups behind this anti-reform, pro-corporate push on health care is led by former Republican House Majority Leader Dick Armey, who went straight from Congress into the world of corporate lobbying by founding Freedom Works (what else is a public servant to do?). Freedom Works is now a major player in tugging at the strings of these right-wing puppet shows across the country. They played a key role organizing and promoting the teabagger events earlier in the summer. And now they are literally writing the playbooks directing health care deniers on how to disrupt town hall meetings across the country. It wasn\’t enough that the health insurance lobby bought and paid for a sizable chunk of Congress, they had to go and co-opt the best motley crew of gullible fanatics disinformation could buy.
Brainwashing has always been one of the most terrifying specters to human society–from medieval succubi to the ubiquity of witchcraft to zombies, Invasion of the Body Snatchers and dare I say alien mind-eels that crawl into your brain through your ear–and rightfully so. The thought of having one\’s body co-opted to serve another\’s agenda, especially to one\’s own detriment, is a terrifying thing to consider, let alone behold. So I can\’t help but feel a little uneasy when I see these people, nearly frothing at the mouths, faces frozen in contortions of rage, rallying against policies that will undoubtedly help them (and potentially save their lives one day), all at the bidding of the men in expensive suits behind the silk curtain. I also can\’t help but think of this:
But I\’ve digressed too much. What I really wanted to get at was what these people are actually saying. I want to get at the real implications of \”What\’s wrong with profit?!\” I want to elucidate it because I\’m certain they themselves don\’t even know.
First, let\’s just look at an example of who they are passionately defending, for whom they are expending so much emotion and energy, and for whom they are shooting themselves in the feet without even realizing it. It is for someone like UnitedHealthcare CEO Stephen Hemsley, who \”earned\” a staggering $819,363.10 every single day of 2009. The total value of Stephen Hemsley\’s stock options? $744,232,068. Yes, that is over $744 million. Is your heart bleeding for him yet?
What about poor Edward Hanway, CEO of CIGNA, who only makes a paltry $12.2 million a year ($5,883 per hour)? I tear up just thinking about him. Hanway is retiring with an infinitesimal $73 million golden parachute, or how he only secured $120.51 million in compensation over the last five years. Now how is the man supposed to survive on that?! I gotta say, I am so upset about this I can\’t help but hang my member of Congress in effigy and run to the nearest town hall to fight for the Hemsleys and the Hanways of the world! After all, if I don\’t stand up for them, who will?
It is tragic, just tragic how these people have to live, if you can even call it living. I fully expect Sarah McLachlan to put out a PSA about these poor men any day now. And god bless her in advance for having the compassion to do it.
But of course this is a zero-sum game. These magnificent profits don\’t just fall from the sky. They come from business operations of these mega-companies. And they even have extra profit to throw around, like the $133 million they spent in just three months this year lobbying Congress to kill (or at least disembowel) health care reform. So just how do these people find all of this extra money laying around?
It is no secret where this miracle money comes from. It comes directly from the veins of their clients. Clients like Sarah from Michigan who described how her insurance company cut corners to increase their profit margin at her expense:
On March 5, 2006, I gave birth to a post-term, stillborn, beautiful, baby girl. Our daughter died because Kaiser withheld care and rudely sent me home even while being aware that she was in trouble. They could have saved our daughter\’s life with a timely delivery but Kaiser does not induce labor since there is a greater risk of c-section, which of course would mean more money out of their pocket. California has a cap of $250,000. Letting her die saved them possibly millions in lifetime care if she had been born compromised. After our Baby\’s death, critical medical records just mysteriously \”vanished.\”
Or John from Oregon, who had the honor of being fleeced by CIGNA:
I became severely disabled 14 years ago with Chronic Fatigue Immune Deficiency Syndrome, Fibromyalgia, and other severe, compounding health complications. It was a struggle, but I finally got CIGNA to pay long-term disability benefits — for which I had been paying premiums for years through my employment. Over the years while I became progressively more ill, CIGNA paid LTD (8 years) — but not very willingly, and they have often tried to weasel out of it. CIGNA even hired private detectives to film me without my knowledge. Then, last November, CIGNA abruptly cut off my LTD benefits altogether. So far, my expenses are running close to $20,000, simply to get my LTD benefits back. This is $20k I am borrowing from family, will have to repay, and will never see again: there is no (legal) way to recoup it — either from CIGNA or from my medical insurance companies.
These are just a few stories (and certainly not the most horrific) of insurance companies denying care or trying anything to get out of paying medical expenses, all to increase their profit. Insurance companies routinely launch investigations of their insureees when they become ill in order to find ways to deny them coverage, for any excuse they can find. They call this practice rescission (like scissor, as in cutting you out). Insurance company employees actually get high marks on performance reviews for denying people coverage. It is their job to not cover people. I won\’t go into any more specific examples, since we\’ve been hearing them for years, but I encourage you to read and share this report, which goes into much more detail with many more examples: \”Health Insurance Company Abuses: How the Relentless Drive for Profit Endangers Americans\” (pdf). Also visit this website, which is a great resource.
So they want to know what is wrong with profit? I submit to you that all of this is what is wrong with profit, or more specifically, what is wrong with insatiable greed (which I sincerely believe is the most toxic thing in this world). How can any sane person look at our current system where insurance company CEOs are making more in a few hours than the average American makes in the course of an entire year, while simultaneously doing everything legally (and in many cases illegally) within their power to deny coverage to the sick, in some cases essentially handing out death sentences because saving their lives would have cut too deeply into their profit margin, and ask (nay, yell and chant) \”What\’s wrong with profit?!\”
Do you know what I want to know? What\’s wrong with having a soul? What\’s wrong with compassion? What\’s wrong with empathy? What\’s wrong with not being selfish? Or, for those who can\’t muster anything but selfishness, how the hell can they not see that this will hurt THEM or someone they care about one day? We all get sick some time, and accidents inevitably happen. When the reality of our broken for-profit health care system finally, inevitably, makes an unwelcome foray into their lives one day, and they decry their insurance companies for denying them coverage, or squeezing every last penny from them and forcing them into bankruptcy, I hope for just one second the irony of their situation strikes them.
For those protesters who may consider themselves religious, I ask you where in the Bible (or your equivalent holy text) did you get the idea that greed is a sacred value? Can you imagine Jesus chanting \”What\’s wrong with profit?\” Would he be holding a sign depicting a gravestone with his representative\’s name on it while he was doing this?
For those protesters who may consider themselves capitalists, I ask you where in free market economic theory did you pick up the idea that excessive of profits represent anything other than an absence of appropriate competition and a fundamental breakdown of market controls? Would you expect a true capitalist to ever ask what\’s wrong with excessive profits? Not if he or she ever paid attention in their microeconomics courses.
If you haven\’t had a chance to read it yet, I encourage you to check out Bill Maher\’s recent article which sought to tackle the question of the role of profit in our society. It starts with this:
How about this for a New Rule: Not everything in America has to make a profit. It used to be that there were some services and institutions so vital to our nation that they were exempt from market pressures. Some things we just didn\’t do for money. The United States always defined capitalism, but it didn\’t used to define us. But now it\’s becoming all that we are.
Please do read the entire thing, and don\’t hesitate to share it if you happen to cross paths with anyone who doesn\’t see a problem with valuing profit above everything else in this world. And if you do come across such a person, and they aren\’t a direct beneficiary of obscene insurance company profits, ask them how much they think the insurance lobby paid to buy their allegiance. Something tells me these people go for cheap.
One last request: If you don\’t want the debate hijacked by the right-wing and the insurance companies, locate upcoming town halls being held by your members of Congress and show up, with your sane friends, and support health care reform. As Rep. Doggett recently warned, if progressives don\’t start turning out in support of health care reform we are going to lose this fight. Visit this website to learn more.
And if you made it to the end of this post, without cheating, here is an awesome video for your efforts:
**UPDATE**
Alright, I\’m going to make this a double feature, because everyone should see Rachel Maddow hit this one out of the park:
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