I've been pounding away lately at Wall Street's ownership and control of our health insurance companies.
Get Wall Street and it's consolidated and focused greed the hell out of my Doctor's office.
I've found myself at odds with the Yoga Logic of hair splitters and well poisoners who claim Wall Street does not actually own or control those shares of stock. Millions of mutual fund investors do.
I will address the merits, and lack thereof, of their arguments after providing the recent percentages of ownership of insurance companies by Wall Street Banks and Funds funds:
United 86.03%
WellPoint 89.03%
Aetna 91.80%
CIGNA Corp. 84.91%
Coventry Health 92.87%
Health Net Inc. 100.59% ???
Humana 88.88%
Amerigroup 108.38% (WTF???)
ARGUMENTS
- Wall Street doesn't actually own or control the shares. Millions of "innocent grandma" investors do.
PATENTLY UNTRUE
a. For example, Goldman Sachs and Co. owns 6.7 million shares in AMERIgroup. An HMO for Medicaid recipients. Not Goldman Sachs Asset Management. Just plain Goldman Sachs.
b. Even those shares that Wall Street Banks and Funds don't own are controlled by Wall Street, unless names like Goldman Sachs Asset Management LP and JPMorgan Asset Management, Inc., are just names with no ties to their namesakes whatsoever. I'm pretty sure they're not asking grandma what stocks to pick.
c. The disparity of wealth leads me to believe that billionaires have alot more say than grandma does. Color me naive.
You see, regardless of who owns or controls those shares, it's blood money. Even it was Grandma Barker. Enough is enough. This specious argument actually exposes another undesirable truth. We don't know the make-up of those investors. Foreign banks, russian investors, oil cartels, toxic polluters, etc. By the sheer bulk of wealth distribution, these are more than likely who owns millions of shares in your healthcare system.
Some gem comments from my last diary exposing some serious Circus de Soleil twists and contortions of logic:
- ...mutual funds are famously indifferent to corporate governance. What that means is that the board of directors & management are self-perpetuating (they pick themselves in the absence of a challenge from majority ownership which will never come from a mutual fund).
a. This person tries to set up Mutual funds as immune to corporate governance by merely stating that they are like Supreme Court justices with their unchallengeable tenure. I'm pretty sure Goldman Sachs picks team players to run their mutual funds. Mother Theresa never was invited to advise mutual funds.
b. The commenter exposes the powerlessness of the individual investor, thereby conceding that control rests in the Banks and Funds who assign their guys to run those funds.
- Few mutual funds are located anywhere near Wall St. I don't think you know what Wall St. is, or why mutual funds are good things for average people.
and
What is your definition of "Wall St"? You throw the term around a lot. What does it mean to you?
a. Priceless hair splitting.
- What difference would it make if the insurance cos. were owned instead by millions of shareholders directly? Answer: nothing. Insurance companies follow the rules that the government sets. If/when gov changes the rules, health care delivery will change. The shareholder mix does not matter.
a. The commenter acknowledges the current system will not change on its own and that it doesn't matter who owns the shares regarding that fact. Greed is contagious.
b. The commenter is wrong to say institutional ownership doesn't matter. Well, if I'm a CEO who stands to take home Billion$ in stock shares and Goldman Sachs tells me their about to dump their shares on the market, driving the price down and costing me alot of money, I would consider myself naive if I claimed to not be influenced by that.
c. If as an institutional owner I can call my Daddy Company and ask for lobbying or media help, I'd say I have more influence than Grandma does.
- Come on. If your shareholders told you to insure people with preexisting conditions, when none of the competition did, you'd blow up your business to appease them? The only solution here will come from Washington. Not from well-intentioned shareholders.
a. I was talking about how Goldman Sachs has more influence than Grandma when this commenter tried to swerve away.
b. Well intentioned shareholders in Health Insurance Companies...huh...oxymoron much. That's a pretty flowery and broad brush statement to describe investors in the death trade.
These comments are made folks who are consistently defending Wall Street banks. The same people who attacked the sub-prime borrowers when overwhelming evidence showed the Banks and their pawns to be the culpable parties. They like to disperse the blame on the masses so as to deflect. So as to poison and muddy the waters.