Reflections From a Murky Pond

The Evil Insurance Giants – everyone hates them, but who are they? WellPoint? UnitedHealth Group? Not exactly; in these times those evil insurance giants are likely to be your employers.  According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, 55% of covered workers were in self-insured plans in 2007. Since the the trend towards employers funding the own health insurance has increased.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi may make a raucous show of vilifying the insurance industry because it’s an easy way of garnering support for the Liberals’ healthcare agenda, but her claims, no matter how loud and shrill, bear only a marginal and passing acquaintance with the objective truth of the matter.

Rep. Nancy Pelosi prefers class warfare to truth.

She recently lashed out at the health insurance industry and urged Liberals to do the same during the August recess.

“They are the villains in this,” Pelosi said of private insurers. “They have been part of the problem in a major way. They are doing everything in their power to stop a public option from happening. And the public has to know that. They can disguise their arguments any way they want, but the fact is that they don’t want the competition.”

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“It’s almost immoral what they are doing,” added Pelosi, who stood outside her office long after her press conference ended to continue speaking to reporters, even as aides tried in vain to usher her inside. “Of course they’ve been immoral all along in how they have treated the people that they insure with pre-existing conditions, you know, the litany of it all.”

But when the painful echoes of the Speaker’s tirade fade away, we’re still left with a problem – the facts. As the White House blog reminded us, “facts are stubborn things;”  they don’t go away just because you scream lies and engage in hatemongering to further your agenda.

A majority of larger employers self-fund their employees health insurance benefits.  A self-funded health insurance plan is an insurance arrangement in which the employer assumes direct financial responsibility for the costs of enrollees’ medical claims. Employers sponsoring self-funded plans typically contract with a third-party administrator or insurer solely to provide administrative services for the self-funded plan.

2007 Statistics for Self-Funded Plans:

12% of  workers in small firms( <200  workers) with employer-provided health insurance are in self-funded plans

53% of workers in mid-sized firms (200 – 999 workers) with employer-provided health insurance are in self-funded plans

76% of workers in large firms (1000 – 4999 workers) with employer-provided health insurance are in self-funded plans

86% of workers in very large firms (5000+ workers) with employer-provided health insurance are in self-funded plans

Any of the amendments, codicils, and/or provisions in the America’s Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009 (AAHCA) that affect the required coverage to be a “qualifying plan” or expand the coverage requirements (part-time workers) are not going to directly negatively impact those “immoral villains” in the health insurance industry. They’re going to directly negatively impact the large segment of American employers who self-fund their employees’ health benefits.

Would anyone care to guess how many of the real “Evil Insurance Giants” will drop their health benefits offerings, pay the penalty tax for doing so because it’s cheaper than meeting the government’s requirements, and just let their employees purchase the Public Option?

Are you still so sure you’ll be able to keep your current health insurance if you like it?

Were you ware that on the morning of May 25, 2009, a Starbucks coffee shop on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, NY was bombed? Probably not; this sort of bombing isn’t particularly considered news by our MSM.

What you probably also don’t know, and would probably have to hunt to find out, is that this under-reported bombing was perpetrated by a Left-Wing terrorist who sought to emulate the violent assaults on “Corporate America” planned by a character in David Fincher’s movie, Fight Club.

From one of the few sites outside of NYC mentioning this, Newser:

A Fight Club-obsessed teen has been arrested for the bombing of a Manhattan Starbucks, the New York Daily News reports. Kyle Shaw, 17, modeled himself on the Tyler Durden character in the movie and sought to copy the film’s “Project Mayhem” attacks on corporate America, according to police. Shaw—who evidently forget that the first rule of Fight Club is not to talk about Fight Club—was busted after bragging to friends about the May bombing, said detectives.

– Rob Quinn

The terrorist, Kyle Shaw, was born in America and is a young, White male. It would seem odd that the MSM chose to not make a big deal about this act of domestic terrorism since Shaw would seem to be the perfect foil for the MSM – that is until you realize that Shaw was a Leftist terrorist.

The MSM is far less than willing point out the Left-Wing terrorists, even White male ones.

Of course this is to be expected; the MSM is infotainment, not journalism and it reflects the cultural and racial biases of its viewers. They’re the ones theoretically buying what the advertisers are selling.

With the Liberals’ fomenting such class warfare and hatred of the wealthy, it’s to be expected that there would be little if any outrage over attacks against American corporation, irrespective of how violent they were.

Scott Roeder, who killed the notorious abortionist George Tiller in a targeted execution, was branded as a horrific domestic terrorist by the Liberals and the media from coast to coast.  US Attorney General, Eric Holder even dispatched US Marshals to US Marshals to protect abortion mills across the nations.

Kyle Shaw, who planted a bomb on a busy Manhattan sidewalk and launched an indiscriminate attack that could have harmed or killed anyone passing by, was and is largely ignored by the Liberals, the MSM, and federal authorities.

It seems that, in the land that the Liberals and their MSM have created in the wake of America, only politically incorrect acts of violence and/or terrorism are despised.