Barack Obama Ohio "Mother" Ad

This is the ad that ran I think something on the order of THREE times during the 11 o'clock news on WCPO here in Cincinnati.

According to YouTube it goes back to AT LEAST September 21, 2007.

Doesn't Ohio deserve a NEW ad??

Other than the ad being a bit old as far as political ads go, it's still a great piece, and very representative of the current state of affairs in America.

As his mother lay dying of cancer at 53, her last thoughts were not of her family or even her philosophical fate but rather on HOW MUCH THE WHOLE ORDEAL WAS COSTING.

That's the kind of country we live in - where we make the dying think about how much everything in costing.

How can we sleep at night?

How can we not give this Obama fellow a chance to try to change it?

Oh, and speaking of Barack Obama's ancestors, here's a video about his grandmother in Kenya.

WCPO's Hagit Limor Discovers Anthem De Facto Doesn't Cover Mental Illness

My good buddy Hagit Limor from WCPO ran another excellent piece tonight on the fact that, pretty much, Anthem Blue Cross / Blue Shield de facto no longer covers mental illness in this area (video here).

Pretty much what they did a few months back is lower what they will pay mental health professionals SO much that most doctors can no longer afford to accept Anthem. When Bridgepointe bolted I KNEW there was a serious problem.

Pretty much if you have Anthem's insurance there are virtually no providers left who will see you, and the few that will have waiting lists on the order of 4+ months. This is NOT a good situation AT ALL if you or a family member are in need of mental health attention.

As Anthem refused to be interviewed for this story, what Hagit Limor could not discover for the purposes of this story is the WHY behind this behavior on Anthem's part.

It's certainly no secret that insurance companies all around the country have tried to dodge providing mental health care. Many states have had to FORCE insurance companies to provide coverage - so-call "mental health parity" bills.

I'm quite curious as to why this would be the case. Health insurance companies have done many other things to reduce or elimate coverage - raising deductibles and co-pays, challenging claims, refusing coverage on the assumption that many people will not appeal, and a whole host of other ridiculous behavior, but they REALLY seem to have it in for mental health coverage.

Mental health care is expensive. No question about it.

Say, if you have high blood pressure you can get away with seeing your G.P. maybe once or twice a year for 15 minutes.

But if your cheese has even SLIGHTLY dislodged from its cracker, you may be looking at DOZENS of 30 - 60 minute visits over the course of a year and some VERY expensive medications.

However, sometimes I wonder if it's not the financial reasons that health insurance companies fight mental health coverage so strongly.

Sometimes I just wonder if it might be ideological.

Sometimes I wonder if those who call the shots for these companies just might be fans of Mike Huckabee's friend Bill Gothard and his REALLY bizarre ideas that "mental illness", as we currently understand it, is merely a lack of "personal responsibility".

I suppose we may never know.

But, hopefully Hagit Limor's investigations and getting her research to Governor Ted Strickland will AT LEAST get Anthem busted down to its shorts for advertising a group of doctors on its web site that are supposedly "in-network" that really isn't ...

WCPO Running Follow-Up To Anthem Mental Health Story Tonight At 6pm

My good buddy Hagit Limor was nice enough to tip me off that WCPO will be running a follow-up to the "Anthem Mental Health" story they ran back in July and that was covered here.

Good heavens - the Mainstream Media actually READS Axinar's.

Our favorite ConspiracyNut will be alarmed.

The Malaysian contingent however I believe will be impressed. :)

Ms. Limor tells me this follow-up story running tonight at 6pm on WCPO, Channel 9 will be "even stronger than the original".

Whether she means to say that the smell of abject greed will be even stronger or that the nausea induced on the part of the viewers will be even stronger upon learning about even MORE penny-pinching tactics on the part of the health insurance industry that jeopardize people's health, sanity, and solvency she didn't say, but this ought to be a good one.

My DVR is set ... now let's hope Time-Warner can keep the thing running until then ... :)

On that topic:
Nine Secrets Health Insurers Don't Want You to Know - Health.com

UK Study Lets Obi Ken's Mother Off The Hook

Remember how Obi Ken (KenDiesel) said he didn't want national health care because he didn't want his tax dollars going towards treating any health problems caused, in particular, by his mother's eating habits?

Well, it turns out that a recent UK study has concluded that obesity is not a "lifestyle choice" per se, but, rather, "an inevitable consequence of a society in which energy-dense, cheap foods, labour-saving devices, motorised transport and sedentary work [are] rife."

Whoa.

Among other things they are suggesting that towns be laid out to encourage more physical activity and that the bite be put on mothers to breast feed as it is believed that slows down infant weight gain.

Are they trying to say that ENFAMIL is responsible for making us all big as battlestars????

Your Money Or Your Life

GREAT story running on MSNBC about some of the really great new cancer drugs we've come up with, but - you know what - people are losing their houses and life savings to get them.

This sort of stuff makes me really, really sad.

The conservatives tell me that our private insurance based system makes these kinds of "miracle drugs" possible.

But what kind of miracle is it when the drugs are so damned expensive you can't afford to eat?

What kind of miracle is it when you have to chose between trying to save your life and trying to keep a roof over your head?

What kind of miracle is it when you live in a country so unimaginably evil that if you DO decide it's too expensive and that you'd like to leave a little behind for your spouse and children to live off of that they won't even fork over the thiopental, pancuronium bromide and potassium chloride that would afford you the dignified exit granted to the kind of first-class scum that rape and murder little girls?

The Indignity Of Being Sick In America

How do we live with ourselves treating people like this?

SiCKO “Hitman” Shares Insurance Industry Secrets With Honest Medicine

There is an EXCELLENT podcast running from former health insurance hitman Lee Einer on Honest Medicine.

Among dozens and dozens of sad stories Mr. Einer tells is one about a family that even tried to pay out of pocket for a sinus operation for their son that was denied by insurance who ultimately ended up with their son in a vegetative state and bankrupt as the insurance company also refused to cover the complications that arose from the originally denied surgery.

I don't know how we live with ourselves the way we handle health care.

You really, really need to listen to this podcast ...

Follow The Buck

Some of my favorite people are the conspiracy theorists.

Sometimes I'm not entirely sure where they're coming from, but, if I understand them correctly, one of their basic ideas is that some tiny group of very powerful people in the world meets somewhere between once a month and once a year and makes all the important political and economic decisions and then these edicts are disseminated through the Power Elite and then onto the people.

I've often wondered how much substance these ideas have, but, having listened to more than my fair share of Power Elite rhetoric, I actually have entertained the notion that there may, in fact, somewhere out there, be not just a small group of people making all the major decisions, but, in fact, just a single human being calling all the shots.

Occasionally I have tried to follow the threads of information and even speculation to find this person - this elusive "Dark Leader Of The Earth".

Very often people of good conscience attribute the ills of the world to the "corporations" and the "CEO's". Well, of course Michael Moore once made a movie called Roger & Me where Michael Moore seemed to be laying the blame for the woes of laid off auto workers in Flint, Michigan right at the feet of the then CEO of General Motors.

Well, I once had a conversation with a Power Elite about this film and the Power Elite pretty much said, "I HATE Michael Moore. Doesn't he know that a CEO is accountable to a board of directors?"

Indeed, as most American public companies are set up, the CEO reports to the board of directors and the board of directors are ultimately accountable to the shareholders of that company.

Now, we often think of "shareholders" as perhaps employees who have accumulated shares over the years, but, fortunately, in the case of publicly traded companies, the major shareholders of companies is publicly available information, and certain "shareholders" keep popping up over and over again.

Take for instance the major managed health players. An interesting name on the list of Top Institutional Holders for each of these companies - Humana, Aetna, UnitedHealth, and Wellpoint is Barclays, and Barclays is a GINORMOUS bank based in England.

Now, what's a little scary is this story making the rounds in tomorrow morning's Guardian that Barclays is selling part of itself to the governments of China and Singapore so it can take over a Dutch company called ABN Amro.

Uh oh.

If I'm following the buck here properly, that will mean that the Chinese government will have a significant ownership interest in all our major health insurance companies.

And of course the Chinese have recently de-socialized their health care system and have a reputation for being one of the most brutal countries on Earth in that area.

You see, hypothetically, in the United States if you don't have insurance and you get mangled in a car accident or something of the sort, they'll take you to UC Medical Center and they'll patch you up, but they'll send you a bill for tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars that they will either hound you over for life or use to force you into bankrupcy.

Not so in China.

No matter how sick you are ...

No matter how mangled you are ...

No matter how pitiful you are ...

They will ask for payment UP FRONT and if you don't have it they will quite literally leave you to die in agony.

Is this what's going on?

Is the Trilateral Commission, the Illuminati, and, yes, even the Learned Elders of Zion - the tiny secret groups purported to control all our lives - actually just a single person?

And is that person ... Chinese????

"When a Michael Moore film addresses an issue of great import ..."

"When a Michael Moore film addresses an issue of great import - say gun violence or a war based on falsehoods, hype and hysteria - the spin-daddies seek to make the issue into Michael Moore."

"The most devastating point made by "Sicko" is how deeply the insurance and pharmaceutical industries have sunk their claws into our lawmaking process through campaign largess and back-scratching patronage."

- John Young of the Waco (Texas) Tribune-Herald in a piece entitled "Film makes point most would like to ignore"

A guy can't be all bad who knows how to properly utilize the word "IMPORT" ... :)

Health Care And Profit Motive Don't Mix

Sometimes I have found myself wondering just how it is that the Monied Elite's obsession with profit came to so thoroughly screw up the access to health care in this country.

Part of the problem, I believe, has to do with the fact that over the last couple of decade many insurance companies have changed from "mutual" companies, where ownership was spread across the policyholders, to stock companies, where shares are traded on the open market.

Now, apparently the investors of public companies are brutal beyond recognition and often punish a company brutally not for overall profit or anything else that makes any sense, but rather over excruciatingly obscure factors collectively referred to as "metrics".

Case in point is a ginormous health insurance company called UnitedHealth that reported earnings last week. Profits were way up, but, as reported by Melissa Davis at TheStreet.com, one particular metric called "commercial MCR" - "medical cost ratio" - showed signs of deterioration and UnitedHealth's stock was pummelled as a result.

The "Medical Cost Ratio" is the ratio of the amount of premiums collected to the amount of medical bills paid.

Now, what's going on here is that because these insurance companies have been moved onto the public stock market, they are being measured as if they are a company selling marshmallows or something of the sort. You see, if the price of a raw ingredient, like sugar, is going up for the a publicly traded marshmallow company and they are unable to raise the prices for the finished marshmallows, mutual fund companies and large investors will freak out and dump the stock of the marshmallow company.

Similarly, if people - [[gasp]] - get sick and have to see a doctor or get some sort of procedure, this is similar to the "raw materials" of the insurance company going up in an environment where it is often difficult to raise premiums.

Net result? The insurance companies try to do precisely the same thing that the marshmallow company would do. The marshmallow company, for instance, might try to use cheaper corn syrup sweetener rather than sugar or try to get sugar from a cheaper country.

Only problem is of course that, in many cases, there are no cheaper suppliers of health care. Once an insurance company drops what it will pay below a certain level, whole classes of doctors will simply refuse to supply to that insurance company - for instance Bridgepointe's recent decision to drop out of the Anthem / Wellpoint network.

Michael Moore, although obviously a little weak on details, is pretty dead on the big picture.

Health care shouldn't be treated like cars or computers or self-sealing stem-bolts. In their distaste for "utilization" and "medical cost ratios", the Monied Elite are causing the suffering and destruction of hundreds of millions of people.

We must find another way ...

Related:
UnitedHealth investors to focus on cost measure - Marketwatch
Healthcare vs. the Profit Principle - The Nation

CNN On How To Battle Your Insurance Company - But Why?

CNN is running an interesting piece about Bailey Robinson, a child with the same disease as the little boy in Lorenzo's Oil and how his family ran up $200,000 in medical bills trying to treat him all the while having their insurance company respond with denial after denial afer denial.

CNN posted several tips on how to fight your insurance company in such circumstances - getting help from your doctor's office and/or your employer's benefits office; appealing over and over and over again; using the right words as if you've been doing medical coding for a living for the last 20 years; asking your doctor to refile the paperwork slightly differently; and suing the bastards.

My question - and I believe the question that Michael Moore was ultimately asking in Sicko - is WHY do we put sick people and families with sick children through all this? WHY should it be a toe-to-toe slugging match to get desperately needed care? How have we allowed ourselves to be so callous to treat people so badly just because they happen to have conditions that might make someone's bottom line look bad?

When you're sick, when a member of your family is sick, you should be able to concentrate on one thing and one thing only - getting better. You shouldn't have to worry about how you're going to drag your mangled body and/or mind into the cubicle every day just so you can keep your increasingly worthless insurance. And you certainly shouldn't have to think about having to make phone call after phone call and writing letter after letter to try to get paid for coverage that you thought you were going to get when you settled for that mind-numbing job with "good benefits" when you could have been off starting a business or doing something else of some IMPORT ...

Hagit Limor Discovers Anthem Is Cheap

My good buddy Hagit Limor of Channel 9's I-Team has just discovered [[GASP]] - Anthem doesn't want to pay for mental health care.

As a matter of fact, for a very long time they outsourced their mental health administration to a company called "Magellan". Earlier this year they decided to take administration of their mental health benefits in-house and, as Hagit Limor discovered, right about the same time Anthem decided to cut what they will pay mental health providers 15-20%.

The net result was that what few therapists and psychiatrists that were still on Anthem jumped ship - including a whopper - Bridgepointe.

Yes, increasingly, if you or any of your dependents is in need of mental health care you're going to have to go out-of-network and pay through the nose.

For all of you who are criticizing Michael Moore's Sicko for not properly documenting the wait times that some Canadians experience for some procedures, pay attention.

There are medical queues right here in Cincinnati.

AND, even if you HAVE "good insurance" sometimes you are talking about co-pays in the $25 - $40/hr range and, particularly when you are getting established with a psychiatrist or therapist, you can sometimes be in several times a WEEK. It doesn't take very long at that rate to wind up on the doorstep of a Chapter 13 or Chapter 7 filing.

At very least the Channel 9 story has prompted Hamilton County to investigate if Anthem's actions constitute a breach of contract.

YES!

It's about time someone takes on those rotten ...

If you know of any other stories of abuses by insurance companies (or any other mega-corporations for that matter), please drop me a note at axinar@gmail.com or leave a message on The Gripe Line: +1 (513) 322-2452.

Related:
Uninsured need attention, too - MichaelMoore.com