Chupacabra Report
News that gets my goat..
-New York Times 2/4/10: Sallie Mae, a publicly traded company that is the nation’s biggest student lender with $22 billion in loans originated last year, led the field in spending $8 million on lobbying in 2009, more than double the year before, and other lenders spent millions of dollars more, according to an analysis prepared for The New York Times by the Center for Responsive Politics.
Political action committees for the lenders and company employees made $2.1 million in political contributions last year, with the money split evenly among Democrat and Republican candidates, the data showed. Sallie Mae’s PAC alone made $194,000 in donations.
-Chronicle editorial 2/10/10: And it gets worse: Last November a study revealed that while promising to reduce costs to consumers, the drug industry had in the previous year raised prices of prescription drugs by more than 9 percent, the highest increase rate in almost 20 years. The proposed savings to consumers were to be about $8 billion a year for the next 10 years. The price hikes added $10 billion to drug costs in one year. Not a bargain for prescription buyers.
-McClatchy Newspapers, 2/11/10: As the nation struggled last year with rising healthcare costs and a recession, the five largest health insurance companies racked up combined profits of $12.2 billion -- up 56% over 2008, according to a new report by activists Health Care for America Now. Based on company financial reports for 2009 filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the report said, insurers WellPoint Inc., UnitedHealth Group, Cigna Corp., Aetna Inc. and Humana Inc. covered 2.7 million fewer people than they did the year before.The report released Thursday also said some of the five insurers cut the proportion of premiums they spent on their customers' medical care, committing relatively more to salaries, administrative expenses and profit.
-To hear it from the right-wingers, the Obama administration is trying to take over the banks and the health care industry. In the case of student loans, the administration proposal is merely to remove the middleman, private bankers dipping into a federal loan program. Cut them out, and we could provide four of five billion dollars more per year in Pell Grants to students and families out of the savings.
-New York Times 2/4/10: Sallie Mae, a publicly traded company that is the nation’s biggest student lender with $22 billion in loans originated last year, led the field in spending $8 million on lobbying in 2009, more than double the year before, and other lenders spent millions of dollars more, according to an analysis prepared for The New York Times by the Center for Responsive Politics.
Political action committees for the lenders and company employees made $2.1 million in political contributions last year, with the money split evenly among Democrat and Republican candidates, the data showed. Sallie Mae’s PAC alone made $194,000 in donations.
-Chronicle editorial 2/10/10: And it gets worse: Last November a study revealed that while promising to reduce costs to consumers, the drug industry had in the previous year raised prices of prescription drugs by more than 9 percent, the highest increase rate in almost 20 years. The proposed savings to consumers were to be about $8 billion a year for the next 10 years. The price hikes added $10 billion to drug costs in one year. Not a bargain for prescription buyers.
-McClatchy Newspapers, 2/11/10: As the nation struggled last year with rising healthcare costs and a recession, the five largest health insurance companies racked up combined profits of $12.2 billion -- up 56% over 2008, according to a new report by activists Health Care for America Now. Based on company financial reports for 2009 filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the report said, insurers WellPoint Inc., UnitedHealth Group, Cigna Corp., Aetna Inc. and Humana Inc. covered 2.7 million fewer people than they did the year before.The report released Thursday also said some of the five insurers cut the proportion of premiums they spent on their customers' medical care, committing relatively more to salaries, administrative expenses and profit.
-To hear it from the right-wingers, the Obama administration is trying to take over the banks and the health care industry. In the case of student loans, the administration proposal is merely to remove the middleman, private bankers dipping into a federal loan program. Cut them out, and we could provide four of five billion dollars more per year in Pell Grants to students and families out of the savings.
As for AHIP and PhRMA, it’s a matter of stopping them from taking over the US treasury. Thirty years ago, health care spending took up over eight percent of the economy. Now it’s approaching eighteen percent. You’d think that with all this spending, we wouldn’t have to worry about healthcare. Not at all; a Harvard study concluded that 45,000 Americans die every year from lack of care. And health care expenses remain the number one cause of bankruptcy in the US, and most of those filing had health insurance when they got sick.
posted by Julia B. @ 10:56 AM
1 Comments:
Charly,
I'v read some historians who suggest that Jewish people, and others, went to the showers rather meekly because they couldn't cognitively reconcile themselves to the possibility that something that horrific could happen.
LD
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