One problem I have with voucher-care is that it will feed these bastards: [Inside the Wellpoint Shareholder Meeting]. A few highlights...
This 2011 meeting was as tightly scripted as a professional wrestling match. The outcome was never in doubt. Years past it was more informal, with a reception afterward where common stockholders could actually mix with the elite. Now the Directors come and go through a separate door. This time they didn't even introduce the Board, which includes luminaries like Susan Bayh, wife of former Indiana Senator Evan Bayh, Don Riegle, former Senator from Michigan, and William "Bucky" Bush, brother of the first President Bush and uncle of GW.
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Contradictions abounded during this meeting. Lip service only was given to the needs of patients ("customers" in their lingo), but the main course served was for their Wall Street masters. WellPoint is making record profits and sitting on record piles of cash. What are they doing with it? Like so many other Fortune 500 companies these days, they are buying up smaller companies, not insurance companies this time, but health-related companies involved in things like medical information technology and expanding their presence in China.
In 2011, for the first time in their history they paid a dividend, which Ms. Braly explained would make the stock more attractive to investors.
While they claim to be investing in "infrastructure, new products and programs that improve the quality of service to customers and members," data suggest otherwise. Since 2008 the company has spent $66.9 million on federal lobbying as well as millions on campaign donations. Over the past 10 years WellPoint's total compensation to its CEO's has totaled over $164 million.
If they are spending on infrastructure, why did they announce in June 2010 that a security breach may have exposed the social security numbers and medical records of 470,000 people? The same month the Indiana State Medical Society reported that WellPoint has the worst claims accuracy rating among the largest health insurers.
Most outrageous of all, from 2003 through 2010, WellPoint spent $21.6 billion (that's billion with a "B") of patients' premium dollars to buy back its own stock.
Spending billions on stock buybacks benefits a tiny elite of CEOs and top officers who are compensated with stock options which increase in value as the share price is manipulated upward. This is an enormous transfer of wealth from hard-pressed employers and patients to CEOs and Wall Street. Not only do the stock buybacks allow executives to line their own pockets, the process strips companies of resources that could otherwise be used reduce premiums, improve benefits, create jobs and bring innovation to the business of health insurance.
The only thing Ms. Braly made clear and unobscure during her comments was that this is a company committed to growth, growth in profits, growth in stock price, and there was nary a mention about the uninsured, the underinsured, medical bankruptcy, denial of care and coverage, or WellPoint's signature profit-making ploy: rescission, policy cancellation after an insured patient becomes ill.
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The lesson to be learned from the last few years is that the health insurance industry cannot be reformed. Not from the inside by shareholder resolutions or from the outside by the Affordable Care Act. They are just too powerful. They have amassed too much money and own too many politicians.
They will not be reformed. They can only be counted on to protect their profits over their patients. They must be replaced by a simple single payer plan like an expanded Medicare For All, guaranteeing health care, not just "coverage," starting at birth.
Conservatives like to claim government is inefficient but a health care system with these bastards as a major player will never be cost effective.
I agree, we need a single payer system.
tnb
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