A couple of things jumped out at me --

A.
"Almost 20 percent of working families with insurance are now paying over 10 percent of their incomes on health care."


B.
"Average working families have considerably less reason to exalt //sic//. Nearly 30 percent of Americans with health insurance, up from 18 percent in 2004, now say they're having trouble paying for food, heat, and housing. "


I am currently on COBRA, and my cost just went up to $336/month. I do not have a rent/mortgage payment or a car payment (KNOCK ON WOOD!!!), so that makes my health insurance by far my largest single monthly outlay. Higher than groceries, higher than electricity, higher than taxes or homeowner's insurance or anything else. And that figure equates to roughly 18% of my wages (when I'm working).

My benefits will run out in April, I won't be eligible for Medicare for another 6 years, I'm not even remotely eligible for Medicaid, and I have no prospects for employer-paid insurance.

What on earth gives this McGuire asshole the moral authority to STEAL hundreds of millions of dollars from people who actually WORK for a living? UnitedHealth isn't providing a "service" to its policyholders; it's simply a vehicle for funneling huge, obscenely huge sums of money from the pockets of working people to the bank accounts and vacation homes and lavish lifestyles of pieces of shit like McGuire and Koslowski and Ebbers and Lay and Skilling (may he rot in jail for the rest of his miserable life).

I do not wish these people ill; I wish only that they would experience some fortunate event that catapults them back into the income level and lifestyle of the people they have sucked dry for so many years. Let them spend a week-end or ten or sixty wondering which bills will get paid the coming month and which will be allowed to slide into past-due status. Let them try to balance the cost of late fees on a credit card payment versus the reconnection charge if the phone bill doesn't get paid. Let them lie awake a few nights wondering if the car insurance premium check will hit the bank before the next payroll deposit.

Maybe there's something wrong with me that I find people like this to be just about as evil as any rapist or murderer. How many people go hungry because they can't afford both food and health insurance? How many people let their insurance lapse because they have to choose between paying the premium or paying the electric bill? (How many women stay with abusive husbands because the husband has insurance?) How many people die or suffer needlessly because some fucking piece of shit like McGuire sits on a "nest-egg" of half a BILLION dollars?

Has he ever actually wielded a knife and stabbed someone to death? No, of course not. Has he ever shot anyone? No. But I wonder how many lives he's poisoned, how many families he has starved, how many children he has abused or neglected by living like a king while they lack basic health care.

I hate people like him, and I won't apologize for the vehemence of my loathing.


Tansy Gold