How Corporations Give You What You Want

In an August 2009 Facebook posting, Sarah Palin wrote "The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama's "death panel" so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgement of their 'level of productivity in society,' whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil."

Never mind that Obama's plans and proposals never included provisions for "death panels." As Wendell Potter, the former Head of Corporate Communications at CIGNA, explains in Deadly Spin: An Insurance Insider Speaks Out On How Corporate PR Is Killing Health Care and Deceiving Americans so-called death panels are a very real thing in America today. Every day, panels at for-profit health insurance companies determine whether or not it's worth paying out a certain claim or adopting a specific lifesaving medical procedure or paying for a new, expensive medication.

Obamacare (the Affordable Care Act) was proposed to combat that problem by providing for greater competition in the health insurance market place. But competition, which is supposed to be so good for free markets, was exactly what the big, for-profit insurance companies wanted to avoid, and most especially, competition with a government program like Medicare, which spends only 1/2 of 1% on overhead (CEO salaries, corporate jets, fancy headquarters) in comparison to for-profit health care companies, which were paying more than 20% on overhead.

Alarmists were warning that Obama was taking over the MRIs and robotic surgery centers and turning the American Medical system into the socialized, rationed health care systems that were killing millions in "Communist Europe". Well, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), in 2013 the life expectancy of a newborn in the US was 78.7 years. The following countries had better life expectancies, based on living conditions and healthcare: Denmark (79.9), Slovenia (80.1), Belgium (80.5), Ireland (80.6), Finland (80.6), Portugal (80.8), Greece (80.8), Gemany (80.8), Canada (81.0), Korea (81.1), United Kingdom (81.1), Austria (81.1), Luxembourgh (81.1), New Zealand (81.2), Netherlads (81.3), Norway (81.4), Israel (81.8), Sweden (81.9), Australia (82.0), France (82.2), Iceland (82.4), Spain (82.4), Italy (82.7), Japan (82.7), Switzerland (82.8). The things that is most frustrating, is that the United States pays far more for its "healthcare" than any of those countries where people live longer. So the Swiss live, on average, 4.1 years longer by paying less for healthcare!

So in reality, for-profit Corporate Healthcare is giving you what it wants: low-cost, inferior health-care, so that it can increase share-holder equity and increase executive pay and benefits. And death panels.