THIS MODERN WORLD

Health care and the free market, with your host, Doctor Hand.

Since this is up on the Pearl Jam site now in the form of a pre-order for a 7-inch white vinyl single (click on CD/DVD/Vinyl), I guess I can feature a better look at it here as well. Keep in mind, this is only one small piece of the actual CD/album cover* — I didn’t spend close to six months working on this one image …!

*and slightly altered at that.

… adding: it’s a little weird, watching this cover begin to sneak out into the world in bits and pieces. This is like hearing the first three or four bars of a song — there’s much more to come, and I wish I could show you the whole thing. It’s a very cool package, the product of a long, intensive collaboration, and I’m really quite proud of it. This image alone is just a hint…

link

This moment, in which the Attorney General of the United States claims to be considering the possibility of allowing our laws against torture to be enforced seems a good one in which to reveal that I have seen over 1,200 torture photos and a dozen videos that are in the possession of the United States military. These are photographs depicting torture, the victims of torture, and other inhuman and degrading treatment. Several videos show a prisoner intentionally slamming his head face-first very hard into a metal door. Guards filmed this from several angles rather than stopping it.

The Special Broadcasting Service (SBS) of Australia revealed several of these photographs, video of the head slamming, and video of prisoners forced to masturbate, as part of a news report broadcast in 2006. But the full collection has not been made available to the public or to a special prosecutor, although it was shown to members of Congress in 2004. When these photos are eventually made public, I encourage you to take a good look at them. After you get over feeling ill, it might be appropriate to consider Congress’ past 5 years of inaction. You’ll be able to feel sick all over again.

The rest.

There’s a panel in tomorrow’s cartoon that I fully expect the apologists and contrarians to tell me is absurd, over the top, could never really happen, yadda yadda yadda, because I always get that kind of stuff from people who don’t actually know what they’re talking about, and assume that I don’t either. Without stepping on my own punchline, suffice it to say that the bit in question is based on entirely true stories:

An investigation by the House Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations showed that health insurers WellPoint Inc., UnitedHealth Group and Assurant Inc. canceled the coverage of more than 20,000 people, allowing the companies to avoid paying more than $300 million in medical claims over a five-year period.

It also found that policyholders with breast cancer, lymphoma and more than 1,000 other conditions were targeted for rescission and that employees were praised in performance reviews for terminating the policies of customers with expensive illnesses.

“No one can defend, and I certainly cannot defend, the practice of canceling coverage after the fact,” said Rep. Michael C. Burgess (R-Tex.), a member of the committee. “There is no acceptable minimum to denying coverage after the fact.”

The executives — Richard A. Collins, chief executive of UnitedHealth’s Golden Rule Insurance Co.; Don Hamm, chief executive of Assurant Health and Brian Sassi, president of consumer business for WellPoint Inc., parent of Blue Cross of California — were courteous and matter-of-fact in their testimony.

But they would not commit to limiting rescissions to only policyholders who intentionally lie or commit fraud to obtain coverage, a refusal that met with dismay from legislators on both sides of the political aisle.

* * *

A Texas nurse said she lost her coverage, after she was diagnosed with aggressive breast cancer, for failing to disclose a visit to a dermatologist for acne.

The sister of an Illinois man who died of lymphoma said his policy was rescinded for the failure to report a possible aneurysm and gallstones that his physician noted in his chart but did not discuss with him.

The committee’s investigation found that WellPoint’s Blue Cross targeted individuals with more than 1,400 conditions, including breast cancer, lymphoma, pregnancy and high blood pressure. And the committee obtained documents that showed Blue Cross supervisors praised employees in performance reviews for rescinding policies.

One employee, for instance, received a perfect 5 for “exceptional performance” on an evaluation that noted the employee’s role in dropping thousands of policyholders and avoiding nearly $10 million worth of medical care.

… of the health care debate, via Digby:

The internal debate on health care strategy for Democrats can be boiled down to this: do we choose the approach whose specifics are more popular with the public and will almost certainly work better in practice once it gets passed, or do we want to go with something that has some bipartisan support and may avoid an all out war with the insurance industry?

[…]

The first thing to understand in all this is the consequences for the Democrats for the next generation and probably longer if they pass some convoluted, complicated, unworkable compromise that doesn’t change the abusive patterns in the insurance and pharmaceutical industries and doesn’t begin to control health care costs. If they pass a compromise that doesn’t meet regular people’s needs, folks will figure it out very quickly, as most people deal with the health care system all the time. If the Democrats twist up this bill to make insurance companies and their Republican allies happy, it is end of story for this generation of Democrats — our party will not recover from screwing up health care.