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Billy Koehler died on March 7, 2009, for lack of health insurance. Mitt Romney said on Oct. 10, 2012, that’s impossible.

The Republican nominee for President told The Columbus Dispatch newspaper last week:

“We don’t have people that become ill, who die in their apartment because they don’t have insurance.”

Technically, that’s true of Billy Koehler. He didn’t die in his apartment. He died in his car. Koehler suffered cardiac arrest and perished slumped over his steering wheel at a stop sign in Pittsburgh because he didn’t have health insurance and didn’t have $60,000 to replace his implanted defibrillator.

Romney, a quarter-billionaire born with a silver foot in his mouth, has shielded himself from the world in which America’s many Billy Koehlers exist. Their paths don’t naturally cross. Billy Koehlers don’t hang out with Romney’s NASCAR owner pals. Billy Koehlers don’t disparage the nation’s elderly and impoverished at fundraisers in the homes of private equity moguls. FDR and JFK made an effort to understand the joys and hardships of the non-rich. But Romney hasn’t. And that’s why he so carelessly called America’s Billy Koehlers a deliberately dependent underclass, albeit one comprising 47 percent of all citizens. Because Romney knows nothing of the lives of the nation’s Billy Koehlers, the Republican nominee can dismiss their medical predicaments as nonexistent and assure wealthy donors he won’t “worry about those people.”

Romney told the Columbus newspaper that no one needs to worry about those lacking health insurance because federal law requires hospitals to treat emergency cases:

“We don’t have a setting across this country where if you don’t have insurance, we say to you, ‘Tough luck, you’re going to die when you have your heart attack.”

He continued:

“No, you go to the hospital; you get treated; you get care, and it’s paid for, either by charity, the government or by the hospital.”

Logically, then, the solution would be for no one to buy insurance. Why bother? Hospitals must treat and bill someone else, according to Romney.

But it doesn’t work that way. The late Billy Koehler is an example of how it actually operates – how it fails to work for 26,100 to 45,000 Americans who die each year for lack of insurance. (more…)

In the case of fetuses and rich people, Republicans insist on the sanctity of life. But in the case of destitute people, infants who imprudently choose working-poor parents and struggling young adults – basically all riffraff unable to afford health insurance – the GOP says there’s nothing sacred about their stinking lives.

Let ’em die. The uninsured should be left to rot. To the GOP, lack of insurance revokes sanctity of life. A GOP audience at a Republican presidential candidate debate clapped and cheered that morality. More recently, GOP leaders said insuring all Americans should not be the nation’s objective.

Instead, the Republican goal is guaranteeing Americans retain the freedom to forgo health insurance.

To the GOP, “freedom” to be uninsured is more important than public health, which could be endangered by an untreated, uninsured, modern-day Typhoid Mary. To Republicans, the “freedom” to be uninsured is more important than the horror of family members watching helplessly as a loved one who foolishly failed to get insurance slowly dies in agony from untreated bone cancer.

One percenters who are members of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s elite club of quarter billionaires can afford the risk of being uninsured. If they fall off a dancing horse, they can pay the medical bills out of pocket. But the non-rich can’t afford a trip to the emergency room. For them, being uninsured isn’t a freedom. It’s bankruptcy. It’s death.

No sane non-rich American wants the liberty to be uninsured.

Despite that, the GOP has repeatedly declared its intention to force the freedom to be uninsured down the throats of unwilling non-rich Americans. Last month, the Republican majority in the U.S. House of Representatives voted for the 33^rd time to repeal or defund ObamaCare. Republicans have tried incessantly in the past two years to kill the law that will soon increase the percentage of Americans covered by health insurance from 84 to 93. If the Republicans could just get Democrats in the Senate to approve that repeal – and President Obama to sign it – 30 million Americans would continue to be “free” to choose being uninsured.

The GOP may get that opportunity early next year. Their presidential nominee Mitt Romney has vowed that his top priority “day one, job one” in the White House will be repealing ObamaCare. No matter that it’s based on RomneyCare, which Romney signed while governor of Massachusetts; no matter that the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of ObamaCare; no matter that Republicans have no plan to cover the 30 million Americans who would lose the opportunity to be insured; no matter how many uninsured people would die as a result, repeal is Romney’s top national priority.

Let ’em die, Romney says.  Sanctity-Schmanctity. (more…)

In a famous “Laugh In” sketch, Lily Tomlin, playing arrogant operator Ernestine, telephones a customer to demand payment of $23.64 for three calls to Topeka and threatens to send a burly serviceman to the customer’s house to rip his phone out of the wall if he doesn’t pay.

Ernestine was the face of smug and uncaring Bell Telephone. Today, she’d be the mug of cocky and cold-hearted health insurers.

In the 1960s skit, when the telephone customer complains about Ernestine having access to his confidential financial and tax records, she says of the telephone company:

“We are not subject to city, state or federal regulations. We are omnipotent.”

Back in the days of “Laugh In,” the customer who Ernestine wrongly accused of owing $23.64 had no recourse. Today, however, because of ObamaCare, the client could call Ernestine and demand a refund. Nearly 16 million health insurance consumers will get rebates totaling an estimated $1.3 billion beginning Aug. 1 because ObamaCare limits the profits that insurance companies can make off of illness, injury and pain.

Take that, Ernestine!

Under ObamaCare, more formally known as the Affordable Care Act, insurers must send refunds to customers if the companies skim off excessive portions of premium payments for administrative costs and profits. For big group plans, the law says insurers must spend 85 percent of premiums on patient care. For smaller group plans and individual coverage, it is 80 percent.

This rule took effect in 2011, so insurance companies that spent too little last year on patient care must send rebates to customers this year. One New Jersey company reported it already has returned $19 million to customers. (more…)

During the oral arguments about the Affordable Care Act, Justices Samuel Alito and Antonin Scalia expressed concern about how the court’s actions might affect the bottom line of health insurance companies. They didn’t talk about how striking all or part of the law would hurt the millions of people already receiving life-changing benefits. This was typical from a court with a disturbingly partisan pattern of putting corporate interests ahead of the 99%.

Most recently and famously, the court led by Chief Justice John Roberts gave us Citizens United, an appalling ruling that allows corporations to buy our elections with unlimited secret political contributions. There are several other less known but important decisions where the court took away the rights of workers and consumers to hold corporations accountable, notes Ian Millhiser of the Center for American Progress.

Among the chief beneficiaries of Citizens United are the billionaire Koch Brothers, who have been using their massive wealth and influence to undermine the economic security of America’s middle class. They fund front groups like Americans for Prosperity that fight to strip workers of their right to bargain for a better life, undermine the ability of seniors and people of color to vote and destroy programs like Medicare, Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act. In addition to giving money, the Koch Brothers organize other members of the 1% to follow suit at their infamous secret meetings of fellow millionaires and billionaires. (more…)

‘Tis the season of resolutions. With the new year comes pledges to quit smoking, get out of debt and spend more time with family. Gym memberships jump. Weight Watchers’ profits fatten.

This also happens to be the season of political resolutions. It’s that every-fourth-year event featuring presidential candidates in a contest of campaign promise one-upmanship. Ron Paul pledges to legalize marijuana. Michele Bachmann swears she’ll cut gasoline prices to $2 a gallon. Newt Gingrich guarantees he’ll create millions of jobs “right now.” Mitt Romney assures every college graduate a job.

Unfortunately, this also has been, for some time, a season of damned lies. These are deliberate deceptions involving a higher level of scheming. The Contract with America and the more recent Pledge to America are examples. Republicans knew they couldn’t fulfill what they led the public to perceive as promises. But the GOP designed these “pledges” specifically so that Republicans couldn’t be labeled as failures when what they pseudo-promised never materialized.  That’s the stuff of damned lies.

Unfulfilled New Year’s resolutions are legendary.  Low calorie salad fixings fill fridges Jan. 2, and remain there, rotting, on Feb. 2.  The victim of this broken promise is also the perpetrator and therefore unlikely to protest the infraction.

These days, political resolutions strewn along the presidential campaign trail are picked up and carefully cataloged on the Internet by reporters and bloggers who hold candidates accountable for every syllable. That’s a good exercise, but the public generally recognizes political promise hyperbole and realizes that unexpected events may prevent a president from keeping his word.  Franklin Delano Roosevelt, for example, pledged not to involve the country in the European war, but then the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Mostly, the public shrugs off presidential contenders’ inflated political resolutions.

Damned lies, however, are dangerous because they subvert trust in the political system, which needs the faith of the electorate to function. Damned lies may, in fact, be an integral part of Republican strategy since the GOP hates government of the people by the people and hopes to shrink it small enough to drown in a bathtub.

In their 1994 Contract with America, Republicans vowed:

“in this era of official evasion and posturing, we offer instead a detailed agenda for national renewal, a written commitment with no fine print.”

That, and calling it a contract, led Americans to believe it was a step above a pledge. It was inviolable, sacrosanct. It was a bond with no double-crossing footnotes.

Except it wasn’t. (more…)

Protesters disrupted a U.S. Chamber of Commerce event on health care, interrupting speaker Scott Serota, the CEO of Blue Cross & Blue Shield. Chanting “we are the 99 percent,” the protesters stood at the luncheon event and used a “human microphone” technique to read a statement about how the “the one percent in the health care industry” is only interested in profit “at the expense of human suffering and preventable death.”

Florida Gov. Rick Scott wants to cheat the families of his state out of $140 million in health insurance rebates. If Scott gets his way, it could harm consumers across the country.

Ripping off consumers and the health care system isn’t new to Florida Gov. Rick Scott. He got rich leading a hospital company that paid a record $1.7 billion in criminal fines and civil penalties to the Justice Department for systematically defrauding federal health care programs. Scott went on to lead a high-profile campaign against health reform backed by the infamous right-wing billionaire Koch Brothers, and Scott used that campaign as a springboard to the governorship.

Now Scott wants his state to be exempted from federal rules that would require insurance companies to send $140 million in premium rebates to families over the next three years. Enter the big winners, the health insurance companies that will get the money instead of Florida’s hard-working families.

Under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) enacted last year, health insurers that fail to spend at least 80% of your premiums on actual health services must give the difference back to consumers.This is one of the best and possibly least known provisions in health care reform. It requires insurance companies to become more efficient and keep less money for profits and CEO salaries. It says that people paying premiums should get more value for their money.

The goal of the rule isn’t to force companies to pay consumer rebates, it’s to hold insurance companies accountable and get them to change their behavior. But if they don’t, they’re supposed to pay, and they shouldn’t get off the hook just because they like their profits more than the new law. They should not be rewarded for failing to meet a basic standard because they can get politicians like Scott to take their side.

And let’s not forget the most important thing: While insurance companies are making record profits, struggling families are desperate for relief. The people of Florida need the $140 million they’re owed. But consumers won’t get their money if Rick Scott gets his way. The Republican governor — who’s been doing everything in his power to thwart implementation of the ACA — has been shamelessly trying to manipulate the law to pad the pockets of a private health insurance industry that will collect $934 billion in premiums this year. (more…)

Is the person elected to represent you listening to you, or is he or she hearing only Tea Party and GOP extremists who yell things like “let him die,” to the question of whether an uninsured person should get medical care?

The candidates for the Republican and Tea Party nomination for president stood silent at a debate when the questioner asked if society should allow an uninsured coma victim to die. The Tea Party audience, however, made clear its answer: let him die!

Beware: The Tea Party would have a 30-year-old uninsured man who falls into a coma die. In fact, the Tea Party and Republican crowd cheers when that possibility is suggested.