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The future of healthcare in America, according to Sarah Palin, might look something like this: A sick 17-year-old girl needs a liver transplant. Doctors find an available organ, and they're ready to operate, but the bureaucracy -- or as Palin would put it, the "death panel" -- steps in and says it won't pay for the surgery. Despite protests from the girl's family and her doctors, the heartless hacks hold their ground for a critical 10 days. Eventually, under massive public pressure, they relent -- but the patient dies before the operation can proceed.

It certainly sounds scary enough to make you want to go show up at a town hall meeting and yell about how misguided President Obama's healthcare reform plans are. Except that's not the future of healthcare -- it's the present. Long before anyone started talking about government "death panels" or warning that Obama would have the government ration care, 17-year-old Nataline Sarkisyan, a leukemia patient from Glendale, Calif., died in December 2007, after her parents battled their insurance company, Cigna, over the surgery. Cigna initially refused to pay for it because the company's analysis showed Sarkisyan was already too sick from her leukemia; the liver transplant wouldn't have saved her life.

That kind of utilitarian rationing, of course, is exactly what Palin and other opponents of the healthcare reform proposals pending before Congress say they want to protect the country from. "Such a system is downright evil," Palin wrote, in the same message posted on Facebook where she raised the "death panel" specter. "Health care by definition involves life and death decisions."

Coverage of Palin's remarks, and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich's defense of them, over the weekend did point out that the idea that the reform plans would encourage government-sponsored euthanasia is one of a handful of deliberate falsehoods being peddled by opponents of the legislation. But the idea that only if reform passes would the government start setting up rationing and interfering with care goes beyond just the bogus euthanasia claim.

Opponents of reform often seem to skip right past any problems with the current system -- but it's rife with them. A study by the American Medical Association found the biggest insurance companies in the country denied between 2 and 5 percent of claims put in by doctors last year. http://help.lockergnome.com/general/Private-HealthCare-Insurers-Death-
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For all insurance companies, the key to profitability is to take in the greatest amount of premiums possible, while paying out the fewest number of claims possible. In the case of the U.S.'s private health-insurers this literally means putting a “price-tag” on human life – every day. And in the particular example of California, private insurers have an especially low level of respect for human life.

California was already notorious for its high rejection-rate of medical procedures recommended by the physicians of these patients/claimants. More than one out of every five requests for approval of medical treatment are denied. For more affluent Americans, these rejections can mean draining a family's life-savings to try to save a family member – despite (supposedly) being “insured”. For less-affluent Americans, these denials are often simply death sentences.

As if it weren't bad enough that callous, private insurers were “putting down” patients like cattle, in order to fatten their already-lucrative profits, this year California's private insurers have shockingly devalued the lives of Californians much further. A Reuters article (“California's Real Death Panels...”) vividly illustrates this greed-above-life philosophy, while also reporting that the 18 largest private-insurers managed to rake in nearly $16 billion in profits last year – despite the recession/depression which ravaged the U.S. economy.

PacifiCare has denied an unbelievable 40% of all claims in the first half of 2009. Cigna has been rejecting 33% of all claims in the first six months of this year.

PacifiCare grabbed headlines when it sentenced a 17-year-old boy to death, by denying treatment for his bone cancer. Cigna was equally infamous for refusing a liver transplant for a 17-year-old girl.

In both cases, public outrage at this “death-for-dollars” attitude caused the insurers to reverse their decisions. However, in both these cases the 17-year-olds died, and in both cases, the delay in obtaining approval for treatment was cited as a crucial factor in those deaths.

These are not the only private insurers in California who have suddenly decided that the lives of Californians are worth much less this year. California Blues has upped its denial-rate to 28% of all claims in the first half of '09, while Kaiser Permanente matched that 28% figure.

Despite the “efficiency” of these private insurers in refusing medical treatment, overall the United States manages to spend twice as much per capita on health-care than any other industrialized nation – even though nearly 20% of the population has no health-care coverage at all.

With less care for double the cost, these health-parasites (and the politicians they have bought-off) have managed to brainwash Americans for decades into believing that the U.S. had the world's “best” health-care system. In reality, it would be hard to find a health-care system anywhere (other than Third World countries) which does a worse job of treating its ill.

The numbers don't lie. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) reports that the U.S. ranks last in life-expectancy for males among 30 industrialized nations, while females fair only slightly better in their own life-expectancy - 24th out of 30.

Part of the blame must be laid upon Americans, themselves. With only the United Kingdom rivaling the United States for the highest rates of obesity, most Americans have an appalling indifference to their own health. However, this begs the question: how did this attitude originate?

For the answer to that question, we need only look at the other health-parasites in the U.S.: the multi-national, pharmaceutical companies. It is common knowledge that Americans pay more for prescription drugs than any other people in the world. This is true even for drugs manufactured inside the U.S. Indeed, with most of the U.S. manufacturing base having been transplanted to Asia, the manufacturing of pills comprises one of the largest segments of remaining U.S. manufacturing outside of military contractors.

Perhaps the exorbitant prices which these companies charge Americans for life-saving drugs are the only way they can pay for their saturation-level of advertising? It is unlikely any American could watch even a single hour of television without being bombarded with several drug-ads, which preach the same, implicit message: there is a pill for any ill – so why bother taking any personal responsibility for one's own health?

With the pharmaceutical companies advocating irresponsibility for health, and then severely gouging Americans for their drugs, and the private health insurance companies refusing necessary medical care to fatten their profits, this “dynamic duo” has done a wonderful job in simultaneously turning Americans into the poorest and sickest people in the industrialized world.

For many years, health expenses have been the #1 cause of bankruptcy among Americans, something completely unheard of in any other civilized country. There is one very good reason for this: all other industrialized nations have government-sponsored, not-for-profit, “universal” health-care systems.

U.S. health-parasites have destroyed the financial “health” of the United States just as efficiently as they have destroyed the financial (and physical) health of individual Americans. While the U.S. economy is already crippled with over $57 trillion in total public and private debt (see “A Tale of Two Economies: the U.S. versus China”), its “unfunded liabilities” amount to an additional $70 - $100 trillion (depending on the time-horizon one uses).

The vast majority of these “unfunded liabilities” are future obligations for health-care, and a large (and increasing) chunk of those trillions will be profits for the private health-insurers, and drug companies.

Despite the fact that the U.S.'s private-sector health-system is unequivocally the worst in the world, despite the fact that this same system is guaranteed to bankrupt the United States (unless/until replaced by government-operated, “universal” health-care), a 'debate' is still raging over whether the U.S. should overhaul its suicidal, private-for-profit system.

The political “champion” for the U.S.'s health-parasites is the Republican Party. With an army of “loyal” (i.e. bought-and-paid-for), Republican foot-soldiers spreading lies about universal health-care, these morally-bankrupt politicians continue to try to frighten Americans away from accepting necessary changes to this broken system – which would literally save the lives (and financial solvency) of countless numbers of Americans.

Sadly, the watered-down version of “universal” health-care being offered to Americans by the Obama regime will do little to save the lives of Californians. The co-president of the California Nurses Association had this to say about the death-for-dollars policy of California's private insurers:

“Nothing in any of the major bills advancing in the House or the Senate or proposed by the administration would challenge this practice.”

She added the following, chilling remark:

“The United States remains the only country in the industrialized world where human lives are sacrificed for private profit, a national disgrace which seems on the verge of perpetuation.”

In other words, the woefully timid, extremely inadequate changes proposed by the Democrats are not a solution – since they do not eliminate these health-parasites from the U.S. medical system, and therefore does not eliminate the death-for-dollars attitude of these companies, where private corporations get fat off of human misery (and death).

Private-for-profit health “care” is killing Americans, and the U.S.'s corrupt Congress still shows it is motivated more by hanging onto the “campaign contributions” from the health-parasites than in saving the lives of their constituents. http://bullionbullscanada.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=ar
ticle&id=2613:california-death-panels-fatten-profits-for-private-insurers&catid=47:us-commentary&Itemid=132

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