Anthem Blue Cross Raises Premiums: Hello! Wake Up Obama Uber Fans

Private insurance businesses are doing exactly what they have always done. When the sun shines they provide the best umbrella your money can buy and as soon as it rains they fold it up.

“Due to rising medical costs”

This is part of the famous line you get when the letter arrives from Anthem Blue Cross, or any insurance company, stating you will have to pay 39 per cent more on your monthly premiums. And if your outgoing is more then your incoming, it can ruin you.

Anthem Blue Cross has no qualms hiking rates for customers. Someone has to pay the highly compensated CEOs, such as Angela Braly, whose gets $10 million per year and off-the-books benefits with stock options.

There may be so-called regulators in the insurance industry but they have no power and insurance companies can decide how much more you must pay whenever they feel like it. They are not required to disclose the percentage of the premiums that goes to paying for patient care and how much goes to administrative costs. This is one of Obama’s many health care campaign promises “still in the works” he says. Some have been already broken and others will stand in line forever.

Most the changes Obama has promised are either stalled or pending since he doesn’t seem want to drop the bi-partisan baloney and follow George W’s lead.  George did whatever he wanted even with a minority republican congress using signing statements to modify whatever the democrats wrote into law.  As I said before, Obama is inept. As intelligent as he is, his style so far has not been practical when you need to get things done in the dog-eat-dog political arena. If he’d been a Roman Emperor, they might have murdered him within three months.

Even if the new “health reform” bill becomes law, it won’t go into force until 2014 and even if insurers will not be able to charge higher premiums for pre-existing conditions or gender, they will easily find other ways to increase premium rates, using the “due to rising medical costs” excuse.

Meanwhile, many more Americans will lose their homes, join the poverty statistics, lose their teeth, or die needlessly because Obama’s fight for health reform never had any heart to it. And because the brain-dead right and their brain-dead constituencies have been too busy fighting against their own interests, wetting their underwear over Obama’s birth certificate or tea-partying his “Socialist” – “Fascist” – “Communist” – “Islamic”  takeover of America -  whatever that means.

The predators who run the insurance companies is a huge issue that will be fatal to the citizens it affects and the overall health of the country. These middlemen must be eliminated.  Obama apparently has no power over the corporate world; it is the other way around.  But we all know that.