In response to Bennie Hively's letter "Sourcing Info." I understand where you are coming from, but I must disagree. If we took every insurance company out there and made it government run to save Americans money, there would be millions of jobs lost.
Therefore, there would be less taxes paid to our government, which would make it not sustainable. People go out and start businesses to make money, not to be controlled by the government. If you owned a large company and were paid $1 million per year salary and had an additional profit of $5 million in a specific year, should someone be able to tell you what you should do with that? Absolutely not. I went to the SickForProfit.com site and read up. I can understand why Anthem Blue Cross would increase their rates by 39 percent. I know, I sound like a crazy person. However, there are several reasons I can understand this. First off, these insurance companies are going to have to take on thousands of "pre-existing condition" people due to the new healthcare bill.
That will cost, more than likely, billions of dollars that they now have to come up with. They also have to take on smaller profits when being paid by the government through the 30 million or so people that are now covered under the new healthcare bill.
Another reason? The economy.
Healthcare companies put some of their profits in stocks, bonds and other investments. Until the last couple months, investments haven't been doing so great, and even some investments still aren't doing well. Everyone reading this letter knows how much waste every aspect of our government has in spending. For profit companies care about wasted money, it cuts into their bottom line. Not for profit companies (like our government) could care less. Medicare fraud costs taxpayers $60 billion dollars plus per year, that's a government run program. $60 billion dollars! There is absolutely no way our government can make healthcare "more efficient" than a for profit company.
A perfect example is the bill that just passed. They added $20-$30 billion in taxes on the orthopedic device industry alone. They are also cutting payments to doctors and hospitals. The kicker? The people who passed the bill think it will lower healthcare costs when they added billions in taxes to the healthcare industry and cut their profits.
Not only that, they are now talking about adding a 5 percent or more "value added tax" or VAT on top of the current sales taxes so they can squeeze more money out of all Americans. Wouldn't it be exciting to start paying a 12 percent or more sales tax instead of 7 percent? How fun. If what could happen because of these ideas wasn't so scary, it would be hard for me to stop laughing.
