Whining All The Way To The Bank

I’m playing the world’s tiniest violin for the CEO of healthcare giant UnitedHealth Group, who turned a conference call about the company’s staggering profitability into a whine about new federal healthcare legislation. The business press, for the most part, ate it up:

Steven J. Hemsley said during a Tuesday conference call to discuss the company's third-quarter performance that UnitedHealth expects "some level" of an operating earnings and net earnings per share reduction next year, when insurers will be required to meet minimum medical loss ratios (MLRs) or provide refunds to consumers.

MLRs measure the percentage of customers' premiums that insurers spend on medical claims.

Oh whaah. The poor dears, why they are completely oppressed by Big Mean Government! How will they ever survive if they can no longer rob their customers blind? Indeed, the CEO’s dire warnings about 2011 profitability caused the stock to drop 3%, for about half a second. But no worries:

THE SPARK: The insurer's stock price fell about 3 percent Tuesday even after the insurer reported a 23 percent hike in third-quarter profit to $1.28 billion, or $1.14 per share. Other managed care stocks dropped as well.

UnitedHealth shares then rallied Wednesday as part of a correction to Tuesday's overreaction to the CEO's comments, Miller Tabak analyst Les Funtleyder said.

THE BIG PICTURE: UnitedHealth also said Tuesday its third-quarter revenue rose 9 percent to $23.67 billion. Its performance trumped expectations on Wall Street. Analysts polled by Thomson Reuters forecast earnings of 84 cents per share on about $23 billion in revenue.

THE ANALYSIS: Funtleyder said UnitedHealth had a "terrific" quarter. He added that the MLR guidelines shouldn't have a big impact on such a large and diversified company like UnitedHealth.

Thank you, United States Congress, for delivering 40 million new customers to these assholes. Steven Hemsley and UnitedHealth’s board of directors and WellPoint and all of the rest of these assholes should be on their fucking knees thanking Congress and President Obama for not just keeping these greedy grubbers in business but actually giving them more customers. Instead we got whining and moaning and political donations to Republicans and all manner of false claims about what “Obamacare” really is.

It’s really hard to find any sensible conservative who can articulate a valid opposition to the healthcare legislation. Once the lies about death panels and socialized medicine have been stripped away, what you usually end up with is some kind of baseless fear that the Affordable Care Act is just a “first step” toward single payer. And God, how I wish it were true. But it’s just not. It’s the exact opposite. In fact, it entrenches our failed, private, for-profit insurance system more deeply into American healthcare. And this is why a whole bunch of Americans don’t like the healthcare bill.

I’m always amused when I see this Diane Black ad on TV. She reminds us that she’s a nurse, and she “led the fight against TennCare’s unsustainable growth.” In short, she’s reminding us all how she helped deny tens of thousands of the most vulnerable Tennesseans -- the poor, elderly and disabled -- their access to healthcare, by denying them insurance. She’s proud of this. And our clueless Tennessee Democrats have their thumbs up their asses and aren’t calling her on it.

People like Diane Black never have any ideas to offer on how to get people access to healthcare. It’s all “repeal healthcare reform” and “no government spending,” but what you are really saying is that you think things are just peachy the way they are. You think it’s fine for people to keep paying escalating insurance premiums while UnitedHealth, WellPoint, BlueCross BlueShield and the rest rake in ginormous profits.

You think our old system was fine. You think it’s perfectly OK for someone to pay insurance premiums on time every month and still get denied the care they need because of “pre-existing conditions” and lifetime caps. In short, you’re saying there isn’t a problem.

And you’re dead wrong, lady. We all know our system is broken. The Republicans haven’t offered any ideas to solve it, while the Democrats’ brilliant idea was to keep the current failed system and just force insurance companies to stop being dicks. Meanwhile, health insurance companies are whining all the way to the bank.

It’s absolutely insane. So, sorry UnitedHealth Group. You just got a profit of $1.28 billion for the third quarter alone. Profit, people. That’s net. That’s after expenses. That’s ... pretty fucking huge. I’m not going to rally in the streets on your behalf complaining about how oppressed you are. That’s just stupid.

Quit your whining, Mr. Hemsley. America's healthcare system is still horribly broken and you're still making money hand over fist off of the misery of millions.

Pith Takes It Back

Last night while watching the evening news and quaffing our elitist swill, we saw a campaign ad for Diane Black, a wackadoodle Republican state senator currently running for Congress. Some of you outside of Tennessee may remember Black as the Tennessee legislator who basically slapped her assistant Sherri Goforth on the wrist for sending a racist anti-Obama e-mail.

Black has received less attention for feeding at the wingnut welfare gravy train, but I think this story is worth remembering because it sure smells fishy. Let’s face it: Republicans hate government and government oversight and regulations unless they or their family members can get in on the action. And you dare lecture us about morality, Senator? Give me a break.

Anyway, needless to say we don’t think very highly of Diane Black at our house, so when we saw in her campaign ad that our alternative newspaper The Nashville Scene allegedly called Sen. Black “refreshingly bold,” Mr. Beale just about spewed his pinot noir all over the flat-screen.

No freaking way, we said. Et tu, Scene? Turns out, not so much. Black’s campaign reached waaay into the memory hole for these kind words, finding something written in 1999--eleven years ago. How sad is that? As the Scene points out, they have called her to task far more recently for her intolerance towards gays and the whole racist e-mail thing. The paper writes:

We'd like to make it plain that the Scene has changed its mind about Black. We don't think she's refreshingly bold anymore.

Heh. Proud to say that over at our house, we never did.

Hey TN: Who’s Looking Out For You?

It seems Republicans in the Tennessee legislature are bending over backwards to do the corporate world’s bidding, none more so than Diane Black, who has gone to unprecedented lengths to make sure the ALEC-written anti-healthcare reform bill bypasses the committee process and makes its way to the floor. Something about sick Tennesseans no longer being denied health insurance because of pre-existing conditions really burns people like Diane Black; guess she thinks free market fairy dust will help people like Demitrie Maralescu.

As I mentioned yesterday, ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council) is the corporate lobby working to repeal healthcare reform across the land through state legislative efforts:

These state-based efforts to repeal reform may be supported and championed by the Tea Party movement (like the Ohio Liberty Council), but they’re being orchestrated and organized by the American Legislative Exchange Council [ALEC], a “business-friendly conservative group that coordinates activity among statehouses.” The Council is currently pushing model legislation to protect “the rights of patients to pay directly for medical services” and prohibit the individual mandate. At least 35 states are using the legislation as a model for their own repeal efforts, including Ohio and Alabama.

ALEC is no fan of health reform or health, for that matter. “For years the tobacco industry has been one of ALEC’s chief underwriters” and has generally been used as a vehicle by which large corporations advance their agenda in state legislatures The National Resources Defense Council reports that “the tie that binds is money, and ALEC’s major underwriters have included the now-disgraced Enron Corporation, as well as the American Nuclear Energy Council, the American Petroleum Institute, Amoco, Chevron, Coors Brewing Company, Shell, Texaco, Chlorine Chemistry Council, Union Pacific Railroad, Pharmaceutical Research & Manufacturers of America, Waste Management, Philip Morris Management Corporation, R.J. Reynolds Tobacco and many other of the nation’s major corporations and trade associations.”

If ALEC succeeds in repealing health care reform, some corporations may benefit, but the residents who live in these states certainly won’t. As a new Center for American Progress Action Fund report concludes, thousands in Ohio, Alabama and the other states considering repeal would lose access to expanded Medicaid coverage and affordability subsidies.

Note to Demitrie Maralescu and everyone else for whom pre-existing conditions makes getting affordable health insurance an unreachable dream: if the Tennessee Legislature takes away the relief the Federal government just gave you, go ahead and thank Diane Black, the Tennessee Republican Party, a handful of Tennessee DINO’s, and most of all, the corporations at PhRMA who dominate ALEC.

A look at ALEC’s “model legislation” is an eye-opener: these boiler plate bills, crafted by corporations and sent down the conveyer belt to state houses via ALEC’s state chairmen (Hello, Rep. Curry Todd!) is a Tenther/free market freak show. Out with the minimum wage! Out with limits on ATM fees! In with charter schools! Out with the EPA enforcing the Clean Air Act! In with guns on campus! And, not surprisingly: Out with ACORN! Yes, state defunding of ACORN is here too. In fact, quite a few of these bills look familiar.

Meanwhile, considering dirty energy’s considerable presence in ALEC (Koch Industries, Exxon Mobil and Peabody Energy have reps on their “private enterprise board”) I found this turn of events interesting. If bypassing the committee process is good enough for Diane Black to yank back healthcare reform, Sen. Andy Berke thinks it should be good enough to ban mountaintop removal mining:

In response to the move, Democratic Sen. Andy Berke of Chattanooga said he'll seek to revive the mountaintop mining bill (SB1398) through the same process on Saturday.


"If they don't want to use the committee system, then we should allow votes on overwhelmingly popular items like mountaintop removal," Berke said.


Ramsey said he doesn't see why the mountaintop removal bill should get a new hearing.

Of course he doesn’t!

All In The (GOP) Family

Hey gang, guess what! Former Senate Majority Leader and video diagnostician Bill Frist has a new gig:

NASHVILLE, Tenn. – Former U.S. Senator William (Bill) Frist, M.D. is joining forensic chemical and drug-testing laboratory Aegis Sciences Corp. as a health care advisor and member of its board of directors.

That’s swell. In the interest of full disclosure, I thought I should mention that Aegis is the “family business” of Tennessee State Senator and Republican Senate Caucus Chair Diane Black whose husband, Dr. David Black, is Aegis' CEO and founder. I thought I’d mention it because no one else has, at least not that I’ve seen.

Nothing to see here, move along. All is on the up-and-up. And by all means, don't look in the memory hole:

WSMV investigative reporter Dagny Stuart details questions raised about state contracts held by a company owned and operated by the spouse of a prominent State senator. (Click here for video. See below for the text of the report.) According to Stuart, Aegis Sciences Corporation, a Nashville-based drug testing company, currently holds over $1.4 million in state contracts to perform “forensic drug tests for the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation and drug testing of state employees for a few other departments.” President and chief executive officer of Aegis is Dr. David L. Black, the husband of State Senator Diane Black, the recently elected chair of the Senate Republican Caucus.

[...]

Although Black claims that none of the Aegis contracts came before a committee on which she served, sources tell Go4Truth that one of these contracts, worth $460,000, is with the Division of Mental Retardation Services. This division’s budget is approved each year by the Senate’s General Welfare Committee. Black served as the vice chair of General Welfare from January 2005 until the Senate was restructured earlier this month. Aegis entered into its contract with the division on January 16, 2006.

That story is from 2007. I’m sure there’s nothing wrong here at all, though.

I only mention all of this because one of the areas in which Frist will advise Aegis, according to their press release, is

Federal and state policies governing health care treatment and reimbursement for laboratory based services

So it’s worth keeping an eye on, okay?