Originally Posted by Herbie Gaines
Originally Posted by Samuel (joe) Harris


I have a good (but expensive) health care plan but it gets more expensive every year and it changes just about every year. This year because of a change in carrier, we got a bill for $7000 for physical therapy. When we investigated, it turns out that it was a mistake and that the insurance would pay for it but the real shocker was that my insurance only had to pay 1/5 of those charges. While the insurance negotiates for payment (in this case $80 per treatment, the uninsured are charged $400 per treatment! That means that the insurance companies and the hospitals are conspiring against us and there IS no "free market" health care. The corporations and insurance companies are like the "company store" in the song 16 tons". We have to fix this corrupt partnerships between insurance companies, drug companies and politicians or we will all owe our souls to the company store. There is so much "free enterprise" mythology sold to us packaged as the American dream. We have to shake it out ourselves because congress is chained to the special interest troff. The world of politics changed since the idea of representative government was conceived so we have to change the rules. Diane Reims suggest a million man march on Washington. We have to do things like that.


We just had the same thing happen...It's absolutely disgusting that if have NO insurance they want 2-5 times more than if you HAVE it. What sense does that make? The more we really look at all of this stuff, the madder I get. The guys at Lehman STOLE hundreds of millions of dollars (in the form of bonuses) right up to the day they went under ! ! How can this be?


Similar story but in reverse. Last year a truck whilst driving past scraped along and slightlly damaged my parked car. Normally it would have been settled by the insurance company. The guy who owned the truck offered to pay for the damage rather than go through his insurance as he would lose his no claim bonus and his insurance premiums would go up next year. I had to get estimates for the repair. The garage estimate for a "private job" was a fraction of the price they were going to charge if it was an insurance job. Standard practice said the garage guy. So what in effect happens is the insurance companies get ripped off by being charged more than the going rate by garages. We the insured have to pay these rip off charges in our inflated insurance premiums which rise way above inflation every year.
This must be immoral if not illegal. I asked my local Member of Parliament about this scandal and he was not interested.
Guess what my MP is a certain Mr Darling (chancellor of the exchequer!!!!!)

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