Health Insurance Rates to Double by 2020 ....

http://rawstory.com/08/news/2009/08/22/insurance-rates-double/

....unless cost controls are put in place.....

The insurance industry may win this battle. Who knows? But, they won't win the war. They simply can't win the war. There is only so much money you can pillage from the people before they have nothing left to take. Mandantory private insurance certainly won't fix the problem, we have it here in MA & it isn't financially sustainable in the SHORT run (financially insolvent in the next year to year & a half). My own sister can't afford insurance for her family of three under the plan (1,400 dollars a month for a family of three making 70,000).

This entire health care 'debate' is utterly insane. There has been almost no dialogue about the simplest, most cost effective, and effective solution for the crisis (single payer). Just a big song & dance about why we have to elevate a completely corrupt & broken private system to a government mandated national level, all so they can keep profiteering off human illness.

It is disgusting. I don't know how any politician can get away with protecting private insurance companies and their profits. Akin to making an argument about why a human infected with a parasetic leech should keep feeding the blood sucker on its body, after all, if you don't allow it to feed anymore, it will die.

I am disgusted with the whole thing. Remove the damn leeches, I mean kick the private insurance companies out of the system!

Fortunately, he lives in his own happy little world... unfortunately he gets paid to spew his whimsical, nonsensical fiction.

A little over double the historical rate of inflation, but "doubled by 2020" sounds a lot worse than "increasing at 6.5%/year"...

Given the huge increases of the last few years....

The government must cover everyone who needs health care. Having a huge covered population will massively reduce administrative costs (and astronomical CEO salaries) spread the risk for expensive treatments, permit true preventative care, and allow the government to negotiate with service providers to substantially reduce costs. Private insurance can be allowed to provide the extras -- like private hospital rooms and elective surgery -- as in Britain.

Every other industrialized country in the world provides health care for its citizens. The U.S.'s profit-driven system is insane.

A short definition of a financialized economy is one in which goods and services are not produced in order to make profit, but rather "money", in the form of financial instruments such as credit default swaps, is circulated within the economy. In the begining, the money is obtained from the middle class by getting them to put their savings into the stock market, getting them to take on large mortgages to buy more expensive houses than they can afford (with balloon mortgages), 401(k)'s that invest in the stock market, etc.

It is the influx of this money alone (large demand) that boosts the apparent value of these "investments". The model is Enron, where cooking the books to make the company look profitable encouraged people to invest their savings into a company which was making little profit if any. The buying of the stock drove the price up. The insiders eventually sold their stock shares at the inflated price, making tens of millions of dollars in profits, after which the stock price plummeted. This scam caused the transfer of the savings of hundreds of thousands of middle class investors to the corporate insiders.

However, your contention that the corporate elite can't win the (economic) war, because..."There is only so much money you can pillage from the people before they have nothing left to take.", is not quite accurate. We have seen how the banks have trashed the value of their stock shares and come back to rip off the middle class for hundreds of billions of dollars more. The hundreds of billions of dollars "borrowed" by the government and given to the banks with no strings attached will ultimately be paid by the middle class and their children and maybe their grandchildren in the form of much higher taxes.

In addition, the billions of dollars now spent for Medicare, Social Security, education, infrastructure, and other middle class services can be stolen by the corporate elite. They keep keep wanting to eliminate these services claiming the government can't afford them, as they abscond with billions in bailout money, and they are always pushing for the "privatization" of Social Security (more billions to steal). Just because the "average" middle class American hasn't figured it out yet doesn't mean the corporate elite hasn't planned for it.

The corporate cartel trade agreements like NAFTA, the WTO, the IMF, etc. will ensure offshoring of jobs and maintain a desperate American labor force that will grovel for a comparative handful of low-wage jobs. The enormous U.S. trade deficit (which benefits the financial industry that "services" this debt) has already resulted in the devaluation of the dollar and a creeping inflation. As long as the U.S. government can still borrow money to hand over to the corporations, as long as the shrinking middle class has a few dollars left to steal, this massive theft of America will continue.

The end result will be the largest "banana republic" in history. There will be a handful of super rich people on top owning anything of value in this country, who import everything they need from Asia, living in obscene luxury, and the rest of the country will subsist in dire poverty. Even without a middle class to steal from, the corporate elite will just "gamble" in a stock market among themselves. Since they will own everything, they won't lose. They will just trade "money" back and forth among themselves.