Health Insurance - The Open Secret

Why is the cost of health care higher in the United States than in any other industrialized nation on Earth? Is it possible that the answer is so obvious that no one’s noticed it?

The one system of health care which really makes the Republicans cringe, here in the U.S., we would call “Single-Payer”. In all the rest of the world, it's called “Universal Health Care” And in the world beyond our shores, that system has functioned magnificently for more than a century. So - what’s the difference between us, and the rest of the civilized world? What happened that made us different? One word - “privatization”.

Health care in the United States makes up one-seventh of our gross domestic spending, but we’re far from internationally-first in the quality of our health. So, where’s all the money going? The problem might be found in one simple truth. The evolution of the health insurance industry in the United States, has been skillfully manipulated to position itself directly between all the people who need health care, and the facilities that provide it - just to make certain that out of all the costs of healthcare in this country, they can carve out their slice of the financial pie - and what a monumental pie that is . It runs into the hundreds of billions, if not more.

If we examine the healthcare industry, on a worldwide scale, one truth becomes glaringly obvious. Universal Health Care systems of every other country, are effectively health insurance systems - run by their governments - WITHOUT PROFIT. It’s as simple as that. Our difficulty here is not “the cost of health care”, but rather “the cost of health insurance”, and the monumental profits which that insurance industry siphons from the healthcare world. So profitable is our health insurance industry, that CEOs of companies can draw salaries of FIFTY-THOUSAND DOLLARS per DAY! In an industry that’s so critical to the health and well being of the American public, is that really where your insurance premiums should be going?

One clause in Obama-care that really drove the insurance industry nuts, was the restriction it imposed on those companies, limiting their profits to 20%. A year or so after Obama-care went into operation - for the first time in our history - insurance companies were compelled to mail out refund checks to their customers, because they’d exceeded their profit limit. But twenty percent is apparently not good enough for these leeches. They liked it better when their was no limit at all, on how much profit they could make. So now, they're into their next trick - directly designed to wreck Obama-care altogether. The largest insurers are now pulling out of the program completely, in a move designed to leave some states without healthcare insurance at all.