Recent comments

Sorry, but the statistics you're quoting are not true. Medicare and Medicaid have a 3% overhead, as opposed to the bloated health insurance corporations who spend a fortune paying executives, denying claims, marketing etc. Additionally, hospitals must have entire departments dedicated solely to billing varying amounts to the many insurance companies and their many plans: a tremendous waste of money and energy. One needs look no farther than the insurance/medical complex to see a huge wasteful bureaucracy. I don't know about the other social service plans that you are referencing with your large, indistinct useless statistic, but medical insurance is done extremely efficiently by the government, and would be even more efficient if they were allowed to negotiate the price of pharmaceuticals.

I hope that this whistleblower recognizes that ERISA is a factor in the current success of insurance companys' thefts of legitimate benefits from legitimate claims by legitimate policyholders. People whose benefits are denied no longer have recourse to punitive damages or bad faith IF they get their policies through the workplace. They can ask for a hearing, but the result if successful will be the same or a very little more than the amount they were orginally entitled to. If people must hire a lawyer, the chance is that a settlement will be negotiated, and the lawyer will take a substantial part of the fraction of the claim that will finally be granted. The feds have stripped away the power of the states to regulate and ride herd on insurance companies and have turned the job of keeping them honest over to NOBODY. Unless one can afford to pay for one's own insurance....in that case, the state agencies still have some jurisdiction. And....I can't stress this too strongly...in the days of bad faith judgments, insurance companies could be severely punished for cheating policy holders. They were often made to pay a percentage of their profits to the victims. Now, there is no incentive for them to pay claims....whatever they can get away with cheating is theirs to keep. If people purchase their policies outside the workplace, the state insurance commissions still have regulatory and punative powers to keep the insurance companies honest (or, at least try to). Both Democrats and Republicans are responsible for misusing ERISA (which, afterall was supposedly designed to protect the pensions of workers) to use it instead to create a situations in which insurance companies have nothing to lose by withholding benefits. Again, our government, bought and paid for by big business, has turned over the keys to our wellbeing to the foxes in our henhouses.