Yet the companies continue to press for higher premiums, even though their reserve coffers are flush with profits and shareholders have been rewarded with new dividends. Many defend proposed double-digit increases in the rates they charge, citing a need for protection against any sudden uptick in demand once people have more money to spend on their health, as well as the rising price of care.

via Health Insurers Making Record Profits as Many Postpone Care | Common Dreams

When you combine the health insurance corporations with Big Pharma they probably account for the most lobbyists on the Hill today. The health insurance corporations are the reason why FreedomWorks had so much money and resources at their disposal to drum up opposition by organizing the tea baggers like they did in 2009.

On February 8, newly inaugurated Democratic Gov. Peter Shumlin unveiled his plan for a publicly funded single-payer healthcare system, which was introduced into the state’s legislature. If enacted, which appears likely, it will be the first system of its kind in the United States and Vermont would become the first state to abolish most forms of private health insurance.

via Vermont’s Single-Payer Salvation — In These Times.

I love this. The first state in the union to implement single-payer healthcare.

Even the Republican Mayor in Vermont is behind single-payer.

On February 24, the Republican Mayor Christopher Louras, of Rutland, urged the state to adopt the single-payer legislation, noting that more than a third of the city’s $7 million annual payroll is consumed by healthcare costs. “The only way to fix the problem is to blow it up and start over,” Louras said.

I can’t help but wonder what the executives at Cigna must feel when they hear stories about the uninsured. Also what do they feel for those whose claims have been denied by Cigna and other firms just like it? Does it not bother them that their entire business model revolves around collecting premiums and denying as many claims as legally possible? How does this help America? Imagine if the families of these executives were to one day be denied healthcare coverage and these lions of industry were left to sit and watch their loved ones suffer unspeakable pain?

At least for one of these industry captains, a Wendell Potter his conscience finally got the best of him. He could take it no longer.

It was July 2007 and Potter, a senior executive at giant US healthcare firm Cigna, was visiting relatives in the poverty-ridden mountain districts of northeast Tennessee. He saw an advert in a local paper for a touring free medical clinic at a fairground just across the state border in Wise County, Virginia.

Potter, who had worked at Cigna for 15 years, decided to check it out. What he saw appalled him. Hundreds of desperate people, most without any medical insurance, descended on the clinic from out of the hills. People queued in long lines to have the most basic medical procedures carried out free of charge. Some had driven more than 200 miles from Georgia. Many were treated in the open air. Potter took pictures of patients lying on trolleys on rain-soaked pavements.

If no other sentence from the article about Mr. Potter in the Guardian remains with you then let this one seep in.

“For Potter it was a dreadful realisation that healthcare in America had failed millions of poor, sick people and that he, and the industry he worked for, did not care about the human cost of their relentless search for profits.”

Relentless is the word indeed. Even now they seek to destroy any attempt at having an effective healthcare system in America. Here are some more insights in to how the US healthcare industry works.

Potter was witness to the campaign against Michael Moore’s healthcare documentary Sicko. The industry slammed the film as one-sided and politically motivated. Secret documents leaked from the American Health Insurance Plans, the industry’s lobby group, detailed the plan to paint Moore as a fringe radical. Potter now says the film “hit the nail on the head”. “The Michael Moore movie that I saw was full of truth,” he admits.

Potter was also working for Cigna when it became embroiled in the case of Nataline Sarkisyan, whose family went public after Cigna refused to pay for a liver transplant that it considered “experimental” and therefore not covered by their policy. Cigna reversed this decision only hours before the Californian teenager died. “I wish I could have done more in that case,” Potter said.

They are un-American there’s no way to get around it. We cannot let these traitors hand us another defeat as they did in the Clinton presidency. Healthcare corporations as we know it must be eradicated and exorcised off of the face of the earth.

Bloomberg.com: Worldwide

Oct. 29 (Bloomberg) — Aetna Inc. dropped as much as 20 percent in New York trading after the health insurer said quarterly profit fell 44 percent, pulled down by investment losses tied to the global financial crisis. The company, the third-largest U.S. medical benefits provider, reduced its earnings goals for the year because of turmoil in capital markets and warned that the falling value of its stock holdings could curb 2009 earnings. Third-quarter net income declined to $277.3 million, or 58 cents a share, the Hartford, Connecticut-based company said today in a statement.

As one of the health insurance corporations which have been the major obstacle to getting universal healthcare in our country; I’m glad to see them in some fiscal pain right now. Even people who have insurance through these corporations often have their claims denied for treatment or surgery they really need. Truthfully, I don’t think these sort of corporations should even exist. We should have a single-payer plan and cut all of them out. Well, I guess if after single-payer were instituted and there were some people who could afford to have private insurance and wanted to pay for it; then they could remain for that purpose.

Update: I’m also happy to see that Cigna is feeling the pain as well.

You can learn more about their efforts by reading this PDF file. It is indeed the health insurance industry and it’s lobbying tentacle AHIP, that stands in the way of single payer or any universal healthcare plan. I’d probably throw Big Pharma and it’s thugs over at Phrma in this as well. In addition to protesting at AHIP’s love fest, the nurses will also be protesting at the offices of Cigna, Humana, Blue Cross/Blue Shiled and GHI to name a few.