Why any Healthcare Reform Should Start With the Goal of F%$#ing the Insurance Companies

I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on here!

Who could have imagined that Anthem Blue Cross and Wellpoint would used Obamacare as a mechanism to cheat their customers:

Anthem Blue Cross tricked tens of thousands of Calfornia policyholders into giving up health insurance plans from which they could not be dropped and pushing them into policies that Anthem knew would be cancelled, according to two lawsuits filed in Los Angeles.

The lawsuits, filed Monday in Superior Court, may signal an emerging customer pushback against the approximately 900,000 cancellations in California alone of individual health insurance policies that will take effect Dec. 31.

Before the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, was passed March 23, 2010, California policyholders who bought individual insurance policies and kept up with premiums were grandfathered in, meaning the insurer cannot drop them. However, policy holders who purchased their insurance after March 23, 2010, or who switched out of plans purchased before the law was enacted, are not grandfathered and must, by Jan. 1, 2014, pay for a policy that is compliant with Obamacare. In some cases that means premium increases, especially for those who don't qualify for federal subsidies. Others will lose access to their personal physicians or trusted specialists.

The two lawsuits allege that Anthem Blue Cross, California's largest insurer and a unit of insurance giant WellPoint Inc., deceptively enticed tens of thousands of Californians to switch out of their grandfathered plans, a practice known as "twisting," in violation of a state law and to cut its own costs.

This is why Obama's initiative to bring in the insurance companies as "Stakeholders" was a disastrous decision.

They were not stakeholders, they were among healthcare's worst offenders. Bringing them into the decision making process is akin to bringing in Willie Sutton as a bank security consultant while he was still robbing banks.<sup>*

*</sup>It should be noted that after he left the slam, Sutton did serve as a security consultant for banks, but that was after he stopped robbing banks.