RICK SCOTT MADE MILLIONS OFF HEALTH NOW CUTS IT FOR FLORIDIANS

Check out the blog post below on the latest from Governor Rick Scott.

Call Rick Scott today at (850) 488-7146 and demand he tell the truth about his reckless and morally repugnant plan to take away cost-saving health care benefits and patient protections from millions. 

In Solidarity,

Stephanie Porta
Organize Now

Extremist Florida Gov. Rick Scott’s Morally Repugnant Stance on Health Care 

 

By Ethan Rome Executive Director, Health Care for America Now

February 11, 2011

 

Rick Scott made his fortune in health care by exploiting patients and the federal government as CEO of the world’s largest health care company

. As governor of Florida, he’s now taking away cost-saving health care benefits and patient protections from millions. But this time he’s an elected official who swore to uphold the law.

 

Since an extremist federal judge issued a partisan (and poorly reasoned

) opinion finding the Affordable Care Act (ACA) unconstitutional, Scott has been pretending the law doesn’t apply to his state. Apparently Scott doesn’t care that the judge is only one of four U.S. district judges who have ruled on the constitutionality of the law and that two of them have upheld it. It doesn’t seem to matter to Scott that the ACA is the law of the land.

 

Whether it’s a political stunt or the act of an extremist ideologue, Scott is hurting real Floridians

 in concrete ways, including millions of people with private health insurance or Medicare benefits. He’s taking away a law that ends the worst insurance company abuses and frees families, seniors and businesses from crushing health care costs and devastating denials of care.

 

Scott’s brazen disregard for the law is no surprise. He’s the former CEO of Columbia/HCA Healthcare Corp and was forced to resign in 1997

. That happens to be when the company pleaded guilty to a litany of criminal and civil charges, including lying to the government about how sick patients were so the company could collect bigger fees from the taxpayers. As a result, Columbia/HCA agreed to pay $1.7 billion in fines and penalties – the largest health care fraud settlement in U.S. history.

 

Scott’s refusal now to put the new health care law into effect in Florida has serious consequences

. He says it’s about the people of Florida, but his action is really about giving control of our health care back to the insurance companies.

 

Scott should tell his constituents the truth about what he’s doing — taking away dozens of cost savings and consumer protections from Florida consumers. He should tell people that he wants to return to the days when insurance companies could deny your care because you have apreexisting condition, drop you for getting sick and jack up your rates whenever they wanted.

Scott should tell cancer patients with devastating medical costs that he wants to reinstate annual and lifetime benefit limits that will force them into bankruptcy instead of providing the care they need. While he’s at it the governor can let young adults know they have to quit their parents’ health plans. He should go door to door and tell thousands of seniors to cough up the $250 donut-hole checks the ACA provided them to buyprescription drugs – and tell them he’s ending the 50% discount they get on brand-name medicines. Scott should call the parents of sick children who finally got coverage because of the ACA and tell them he’s canceling their insurance. He should also tell small businesses he’s taking away their job-creating tax credits.

Since Scott is independently wealthy, why doesn’t he take out ads in all of Florida’s local newspapers telling families, seniors, college students and small businesses to start worrying about their health care again? He could also confess that as a rich man he has no idea what it means to be pushed around by health insurance companies or overwhelmed by spiraling costs.

Rick Scott’s decision to buck the law is reckless, wrong and morally repugnant. Scott’s not alone. Extremists in some states, such as Iowa

, Utahand Wyoming, are following his lead, but thankfully a majority of states are appropriately moving forward with implementation–even states likeGeorgia, Texas, Virginia, and Wisconsin, which are part of the lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the law.

 

It’s OK to challenge a federal law. It’s not OK to unilaterally refuse to follow it. What Rick Scott is doing is unconscionable.

 

THE REAL DEATH PANELS!

Posted on Aug 13, 2009

By Joe Conason

When Republican politicians and right-wing talking heads bemoan the fictitious “death panels” that they claim would arise from health care reform, they are concealing a sinister reality from their followers. The ugly fact is that every year we fail to reform the existing system, that failure condemns tens of thousands of people to die—either because they have no insurance or because their insurance companies deny coverage or benefits when they become ill.

The best estimate of the annual death toll among Americans of working age due to lack of insurance or under-insurance is at least 20,000, according to studies conducted over the past decade by medical researchers, and the number is almost certainly rising as more and more people lose their coverage as costs continue to go up.

They die primarily because they didn’t have the coverage or the money to pay doctors and thus delayed seeking treatment until it was too late. They don’t get checkups, screenings and other preventive care. That is why uninsured adults are far more likely to be diagnosed with a disease, such as cancer or heart disease, at an advanced stage, which severely reduces their chances of survival.

This isn’t news. Seven years ago, the Institute of Medicine found that approximately 18,000 Americans had died in 2000 because they had no insurance. Using the same methodology combined with Census Bureau estimates of health coverage, the Urban Institute concluded that the incidence of death among the uninsured was enormous. Between 2000 and 2006, the last year of that study, the total number of dead was estimated to have reached 137,000—a body count more than double the number of casualties in the Vietnam War.

The Institute of Medicine also found that uninsured adults are 25 percent more likely to die prematurely than adults with private health insurance, and other studies have warned that uninsured adults between the ages of 55 and 64 are even more prone to die prematurely. A lack of health insurance is the third-leading cause of death for that age cohort, following heart disease and cancer.

All those appalling figures, which are real rather than mythical, do not include the casualties of insurance company profiteering—namely, all the people, including small children, who perish because of the anonymous “death panels” that deny or delay coverage to consumers.

Perhaps the most notorious case in recent years was that of Nataline Sarkisyan, the 17-year-old leukemia patient whose liver transplant was held up by insurance giant Cigna HealthCare. She died for no reason except to protect Cigna’s profit margin, but her unnecessary and cruel demise was hardly unique.

Research by the American Medical Association found that the nation’s largest insurance companies deny somewhere between 2 percent and 5 percent of all the claims submitted by doctors. That rough estimate is the best available because private insurers are not required to reveal such statistics (although they certainly maintain them), and the government does not collect them.

But in June, a House Energy and Commerce Committee investigation found that three major insurance companies—Golden Rule, Assurant and WellPoint—rescinded the coverage of at least 20,000 people between 2003 and 2007 for minor errors, including typos, on their paperwork; a pre-existing condition; or a family member’s medical history.

“They try to find something—anything—so they can say that this individual was not truthful,” said Rep. Henry Waxman, the California Democrat who oversaw the committee probe. He warned that insurance companies launch these nitpicking inquisitions whenever a policyholder becomes ill with a certain kind of condition—usually a costly and deadly one, such as ovarian cancer or leukemia. The result is denial and loss of coverage—and we now know that means increased mortality for innocent people.

So, who are the members of the death panels?

You can find them among the corporate bureaucrats who concoct excuses to deny coverage and throw the sick off their rolls. You can find them among the politicians and lobbyists who have stalled reform for years while people died. You can find them among the morons who show up to shout slogans at town halls rather than seek solutions. And you can find them among the cable and radio blabbers, who invent scary stories about reform to conceal the sickening truth.

Joe Conason writes for The New York Observer.

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ZOMBIES RUNNETH AMOK

What a lot of individuals have a hard time grasping is the total control that Corporate America has over our country. The government of this country stopped representing the common people a long time ago. Their vested interests became those of Corporate America. After all, who had the biggest parties in Washington, D.C., who supplied the women and the booze, but more importantly who contributed untold millions to the election campaigns of most politicians! So it isn’t some big mystery why their interests should be placed above those of the people. After all, when times are good, most people won’t even realize what is going on and when things do turn bad, corporate America will be bailed out by the same politicians that they have been funneling money to for years. And with their monopoly control of the media markets they will turn the public attention from the real culprits, to lay the blame on those less fortunate and who cannot defend themselves, the poor. Do you really imagine it is the poor who are responsible for the untold trillions that have gone to the war machine, to fight a basically non-existent adversary, an adversary that cannot begin to match our military? Who will pay for this bailout, ultimately, you and I, the people?

When GM, AIG, and the other behemoths of industry started to fold because of their mismanagement of resources our elected government was, and is, there to bail them out. Forget about the reasons why they were going under, such as failure to look to the future with regards to products that would reflect the needs of the 21st century; forget the eight years where they were deregulated and left to run amok. It is this deregulation of all aspects of the corporate world that created this world of lost jobs, lost retirements, lost hope. Yet, there are still segments of the population, albeit, small, that cannot, or will not, see the trees through the forest. They have lost all objectivity. They are the zombies of the right, non-thinking, robots who will do whatever their masters bid. These are the same people who complain about how the country has changed. How there are no more small town businesses, that every community looks like every other. How America has lost its individuality. Hello, it is corporate America that has caused this with their takeover of the countryside, with their supercenters putting Mom and Pop businesses under; their Agricultural Corporations doing in most small family farms, our America is gone.

And the zombies just continue on complaining but never seeing the reality. They listen to the ballgames, watching them play football, baseball, and the other pastimes, the players, who make millions of dollars for putting their pastime skills on display. These players who will never have to work at a regular job in their lifetime. They watch all this, never realizing that this is another way corporate America and their government keeps the population under control. The young zombies and their parents think that this is the life that may be theirs, all they have to do is hone their athletic capabilities and soon they’ll be making millions and leading the easy life, foregoing higher education, an education that could possible reveal the true workings of the NEW WORLD ORDER.

Diverting the public attention to the reality of life is the biggest tool that Corporate America utilizes. Propagating half truths and downright lies is their goal, with creating a mass feeding frenzy, their ultimate goal. They relish hatred, they relish the people fighting amongst themselves, and they relish pandemonium. An utter state of confusion is their breeding ground for falsehoods and misdirection.

National Healthcare is desired by over 60 percent of the American public, the American Medical Association wants it (that’s the doctors), The only ones not wanting this is the Insurance Companies and the Pharmaceutical companies, and of course, the zombies who do their bidding. That should tell you something. Why don’t the Insurance companies and the pharmaceutical companies want this? It is because they make much more money NOW!!! So, let’s see, do you understand this, we pay more now than we would if this legislation is passed, get it?

I’ve never seen a Zombie being brought back; once they have reached that staged they are too far gone. The only hope that rational thinking Americans have is their numbers. There are many more out there than the zombies, however they tend to be quiet and laid back, often not acting until it is too late. We cannot afford to let that be the case now. Don’t let the Zombies dictate the will of Corporate America, remember what that delivered during the last eight years, it is not easy to be normal, wanting peace, prosperity, hope and a future, but you must arise to the occasion or see another nail inserted into the coffin of our Democracy. We have the numbers.