Pigs get fed, hogs get slaughtered. Or so the old saying in the investment business goes. It's a warning against unbridled greed. We'll know in the next few months if it applies to the industry of origin. We may know sooner if it's relevant to one of the foulest stenches in the modern corporate world. I'm talking about health insurance companies. Some may call this jumping the gun, I hope they're wrong, for the rest of you, put on your rant helmets. Because guys, this one is a long time coming, it's coming from the heart baby, and the addressee is Private Health Insurance, Inc.
Like damn near everyone else in this great nation I have fought tooth and nail against you soulless rat bastard health insurance companies for most of my adult life. Over seeing a specialist, over sets of X-rays, over a bottle of goddamn high blood pressure pills, and a hundred other flaming hoops of death you worthless scum have made me jump through after collecting my thousands of dollars in premiums. I have watched talented, bright young doctors and grizzled veteran MDs shutter their offices, retire, move to greener pastures or retreat into academia because of you. I have witnessed passionate HR managers of small companies and caring, over worked hospital staffers run screaming away from good jobs rather than play a minute part in the horrific Bataan death march of paperwork and denial forced on them, because of you.
I have seen friends and loved ones go the grave not just still fighting you, but because of you.
Your paid whores are fond of lecturing us as if we were children that you are a critical one sixth of the economy. Bullshit. You are the intestinal fluke in healthcare, and your subsistence strategy in that business biome makes a blood sucking parasite look downright attractive. You think that's too harsh? Stop reading, because it's going to get harsher and shriller.
What exactly do you contribute to society in any productive way that we cannot get directly simply through pooling risk administered by a government program? Nothing. Absolutely nothing at all. UPS or FedEx will turn up their noses at delivering a letter from Iraq to that last mail box on a lonely stretch of rural road for fifty cents, the importance of that letter's contents to sender or sendee is not a factor in their business plan. The US Post Office has to do that. Why? Because it's not profitable to deliver that mail. Just like it's not profitable to insure the sick, the injured, those with such poor judgment they chose to be born with a birth defect or afflicted with a puzzling autoimmune diseased. It never fucking will be, and it's clear to anyone but a koolaide swilling dipshit that you have actuarially calculated that out to the last ugly penny.
Did you perfect the cardiac bypass procedure? Did an insurance company invent tomography or magnetic resonance imaging somewhere along the way and I missed that announcement? Perhaps your have a secret lab where you developed Bevacizumab and simply forget to tell the world that your new cancer drug could stop malignant tumors in their deadly, bloodthirsty tracks?
No, you did none of that. Those events were a product of real innovators, real life savers, productive capitalism. Far from helping bring them into the world of healing and chase away the Reaper, you stood, proudly, like a firewall of death between those treatments and a thousand others like them, and the tragedy they could have prevented. You denied those patients life, you sons of bitches, you shuffled papers in pretense, you pawned suffering, pain wracked, terrified human beings off on hapless ten dollar an hour call center reps while those patients faded and died. You intentionally dragged your feet and hired an army of lawyers to delay that treatment until the patient no longer needed a doctor or a nurse, they needed a pastor and a mortician.
Brokers don't need you. Ask any insurance or brokerage branch office manager. A dozen wholesalers offering different products come calling everyday. Every week. Hoping to ply the sales force with cheap donuts and glossy handouts on life insurance or annuities and a whole bag of product lines besides group health insurance.
Explain it to us again, talk slowly like we really are children. What the fuck is it you are good for? Who exactly needs you if we have Medicare for all?
As for the CEOs and senior bean counters that run your foul wretched, companies, and the politicians you have bought, if only extreme forms of medieval capital punishment were still in vogue. You, you sucking chest wound of a human being, you deserve to have a sharp pole rammed up your ass and left high atop your last executive office chair to die a painful, public lingering death -- like the one you gleefully condemned so many of you so-called customer to, in exchange for yachts and overseas junkets and exclusive greens and links. You deserve to sit there, impaled Vladesque, until the light slowly leaks out of your eyes. Until the hope deserts you in your hour of greatest need just like your desperate customers. To bleed and suffer and vomit, until you mercifully pass on, swell up, split open, and the putrid flesh sluices off your gleaming predatory bones in a thick black cloud of fat and happy flies.
This public option isn't what most of us would like to see. But it's real, it has an opt in for states. And God help the governors and state lawmakers who do not opt in. Pictures of little Johnny or Aunt Thelma wasting away because Gov Billy Bob Redneck dumbass wanted to stand on conservative principle make potent campaign ads. That's how political careers come to a crashing, screeching, end.
It's going to catch on, and you have no one but your greedy selves to blame. You bribed Congress, you mobilized your astroturf army of teabagging morons: you methodically managed to piss just about everyone else off with rate jacks and rescinds and "Oh, we changed our mind, here's your premiums back, good luck with chemo.' You pissed off McJoan, you ticked off NYCEeve, you made Slinkerwink angry, you set Jane Hamsher -- herself a cancer survivor -- into a rage. You motivated hundreds of grass roots activists who, as far as I'm concerned, should get a cape and a suit with a big S painted on the chest. While you spend the rest of your days in a Syrian shithole equipped with mobile waterboards and car batteries mounted on wheels complete with testicular clamps.
You did this while sending around self congratulatory memos in celebration over your continued success, in being able buy Congress, in inventing nonsense scare tactics to feed Fox News and prime the half ass legit media with that trash; you congratulated yourselves because you could keep killing people for profit. When and if the day comes that the last of your slimy, stinking species goes extinct, I have a little celebration of my own in mind. Lucky for you, I'm a progressive and I'd settle for the etymology of corporation, corpus; body, corpse, your company. Whether I'm sixty years-old, or ninety, when the last of your kind enters the first stage of fossilization, I'll drag my ancient, hobbled government insured ass to your unmarked corporate grave and dance a fucking jig of ecstasy for all humanity over your foul, mineralizing remains. Until that day, if I see you senior fat hogs on the street, I'll try, I'll really try, not to kick your balls into the roof of your mouth where they belong.