As our fearless elected leaders work day in and day out to kill off meaningful healthcare reform, more and more of their constituents continue to lose jobs. When most folks lose jobs they also lose health insurance. Obtaining affordable independent health insurance is impossible because 1. it is too expensive for folks with jobs much less those without and 2. even if one could afford it, well hells bells, it seems that insurance companies do not take patients with pre-existing conditions. A pre-existing condition can include acne and pregnancy. Under present day insurance guidelines one can safely assume that not one human being on the planet is without a pre-existing condition.
Thanks to former Cigna executive, Wendall Potter, we know how the insurance companies pull off $13 billion, that would be billion in profits per year. The insurance industry also has $1.4 million a day to burn on killing health care reform efforts.
So, how does the industry realize such awesome profits?
Who would have thought?
Deny care. Hand out death sentences.
Senators Cornyn and Hutchison have to make a choice. Will they continue to support their sugar daddies in insurance or will they support those who elected them into office?
As we know taxpayers fund the salaries and benefits of our elected leaders. The benefits include health care coverage for lawmakers and their families. Today ABC News reported on the best health care that taxpayer money can buy at a very low cost.
This fall while members of Congress toil in the U.S. Capitol, working to decide how or even whether to reform the country's health care system, one floor below them an elaborate Navy medical clinic -- described by those who have seen it as something akin to a modern community hospital -- will be standing by, on-call and ready to provide Congress with some of the country's best and most efficient government-run health care.
Members of Congress do not have to wait to be treated.
"A member walked in and was generally walked right back into a physician's office. They get good care. They are not rushed. They are examined thoroughly," said Eduardo Balbona, an internist in Jacksonville, Fa., who worked as a staff physician in the OAP from 1993 to 1995.
"You have time to spend to get to know your patients and think about them and really think about how you preserve their health going forward," Balbona said. "We're not there to put on Band-Aids. We were there to make sure that everything possible that could be done [is done] to preserve that member of Congress."
Congress members are treated at the best hospitals in the area such as Johns Hopkins and the Cleveland Clinic. Specialists are brought to the Capitol, often at no charge to the member.
Sources said when specialists are needed, they are brought to the Capitol, often at no charge to members of Congress.
"If you had, for example, prostate cancer, you would go to one of the centers of excellence for the country, which would be Johns Hopkins. If you had coronary artery disease, we would engage specialists at the Cleveland Clinic. You would go to the best care in the country. And, for the most part, nobody asked what your insurance was," Balbona said.
Congress members pay $503. a year for the best health care in the U.S.
Members of Congress do not pay for the individual services they receive at the OAP, nor do they submit claims through their federal employee health insurance policies. Instead, members pay a flat, annual fee of $503 for all the care they receive. The rest of the cost of their care, sources said, is subsidized by taxpayers.
All of that for $503.00.
In other words, Congress members do get the very best of the best for very little.
Anderson said members of Congress are treated by specialists from military hospitals who visit the OAP at no charge. Congressmen are also eligible for free out-patient care at military facilities in the Washington, D.C., area, including Walter Reed Army Medical Center and Bethesda Naval Medical Center.
One member of Congress has an ethical backbone and had the integrity to turn down his taxpayer funded coverage. He said if his constituents could not have the same, he did not want it for himself. Imagine that.
Rep. Steve Kagen of Wisconsin -- one of 15 medical doctors in Congress -- is the only member of either the House or Senate who has no health insurance coverage. Kagen, a Democrat and advocate for health care reform, said he turned down the plan he was offered through the Federal Employee Health Benefits Program.
"I said, 'I'll tell you what. I respectfully decline. Until you can make the same offer to everyone that I have the honor of representing, I just don't think it's fair," Kagen said he told the congressional staffer who reviewed the plan with him in 2006.
Senators Cornyn and Hutchison should do the same. Get us what you have, Senators, or give up yours.
