Disappeared News

by Larry Geller

This needs to be verified, but it has that air of truthiness (sadly) about it. A snip from this morning’s broadcast of Amy Goodman’s interview with Michael Moore after the health insurance reform bill passed:

MICHAEL MOORE:
…
But in the long run, at least 15 million Americans are still not going to have health insurance. And as you said, those who have it are going to be forced to buy a defective product. And trust me on this one thing: the insurance companies, they’re not going to go quietly into the night on this, even though they lost. They’re going to find ways to trick up the system to get around it, to raise premiums.

It’s not going to be as easy as it sounds. “Oh, you’ve got a pre-existing condition. No problem.” Well, not exactly “no problem.” You know, the so-called controls that this bill puts on them are Mickey Mouse. For instance, if they deny you health insurance—let’s say Aetna won’t give you health insurance because you have a pre-existing condition, and you say to them, “Hey, wait a minute. That’s against the law.” And they’re going to go, “Whoa, yeah. Sue me.” Because you know what the fine is, the fine for them for denying somebody because they have a pre-existing condition? One hundred dollars a day. So if you’re Aetna, and you’ve got a patient who maybe needs, you know, a $100,000 operation, what would you do? Would you pay out the $100,000 operation because the law says you have to? Or do you break the law but just get a $100-a-day fine? Because, let’s see, after a year that would be $36,500 versus a $100,000 operation. Gee, I wonder which one Aetna’s going to go for. And of course, they could just hope against hope that within a year the person without the operation might be dead, so they won’t have to be worrying about shelling out any more money to a doctor or to a hospital.

Permalink posted by Larry @ 3/23/2010 10:16:00 AM