youtube.com — This is obscene -- the biggest health insurance company (WellPoint, aka Blue Cross Blue Shield) is suing the state of Maine for refusing to guarantee it a profit margin in the midst of a painful recession. If you are in Maine, or have friends who are -- they need to see this!
Oct 5, 2009 View in Crawl 4
sarahleeOct 5, 2009
We need to eliminate fpr profit companies from basic heatlh care/insurance - Just allow any citizen who wants to sign up for Medicare if we can't enact single Payer now.
berkanaOct 6, 2009
$9.8 million dollars a year, to the CEO. Let me put that in perspective.$50,000 a year is a pretty decent salary. $100,000 per year is twice that. The CEO of Wellpoint got paid, in one year, $9,800,000. That's 98 * $100K, and 196* $50K. That's nearly 200 times the salary of an engineer. And that's only the CEO; I imagine the other bigwigs in that company get paid comparably.Healthcare should not be done for profit any more than emergency services should be. Cancer, diabetes, and other illnesses essentially constitute slow-motion emergencies; they'll kill you and debilitate you, but being far slower than a car crash, you can't just call 911 for care. If we wouldn't stand for a privatized, for-profit emergency care system, why should we stand for a privatized, for-profit health care system?
alderonOct 6, 2009
Well you had me till you went off on healthcare for profit part. This is about insurance, which is the root of the problem that and government regulations to keep cost high for insurance companies to make more bucks. Get government out of healthcare all together and the fair market will allow the prices to come down as soon as we put a cap on John Edward's type lawsuits. To answer your question, because the private citizen that works/pays his/her way through medical school to get the "DR" has to pay the school and bankster's off for the loans he/she incurred while learning how to take care of the sick folks.