It's Enough to Make You Sick

Most Americans want a system of "single payer" or universal health care along the lines of what we have here in Canada. The polls leave that beyond doubt. Some Americans, however, including the oligarchy that has quietly ousted what used to be a democracy, are determined to see that never happens.

If the people want it and it could be done at less expense than what they're doing now, why not give them what they want? Well, you see, there's this one little problem - money. There's an enormous amount of money driving the current system - money that flows to some enormously profitable outfits like the medical insurers and pharmaceutical industry. These groups are rolling in so much money, they just have to toss a bit of that to the wonderful people who see to it that the gravy train just keeps rolling - the government of the United States, especially those Republicans.

For obvious reasons these health insurers like to keep a low profile. So do most successful burglars. Every now and then, however, we get a glimpse at the wonderful men and women who run this industry, people like Dr. William McGuire.

Bill, as I like to call the old rascal, was the CEO and driving force behind one of America's two top health care insurers, the UnitedHealth Group. Bill, as I like to call him, got the boot yesterday over a scandal concerning his stock options. You see Bill, as he's known at the club, seems to have gotten a lot of these stock options backdated.

Backdating is, in effect, playing with the notional date at which stock options are granted. If the stock value plummets to a low of $1 on the 1st of October, for example, and the option is backdated to then, you can later exercise that option to buy your shares at that bottom price. If the share value at the time you exercise your option has hit the roof, it's a lot like winning the lottery - just without the risk.

Now Bill, as his friends refer to him, stood to make well over a billion dollars on the stock option thing. That caused some upset investors to have UnitedHealth hire an independent law firm to look into the whole thing. Their findings weren't too good for Bill, as we in the yachting circles have come to know him.

The disgraced Dr. William McGuire (who's "Bill" anyway?) has been forced to resign and his stock options have been revalued from lowest values to highest values which really cuts into the profits. I don't know how this guy is going to make it. According to the New York Times, all Dr. McGuire has to show for his 13-years at UnitedHealth are salary, bonuses, buyouts and stock options now slashed to a mere $522 million.

But it's not just the guys at the top who are getting screwed by these health insurers. Sometimes the little people get it too. There are people like the Shaeffers of Murietta, California. their 4-year old daughter was diagnosed with a potentially fatal tumor in her jaw. The Shaeffers' insurer Blue Cross, after paying 20,000 for her treatments, cut off the Shaeffers' coverage. They blamed the parents for failing to disclose a bump on their daughter's chin at the time they applied for coverage. It doesn't matter that no one, including the Shaeffers' family doctor, thought anything was amiss. For all anybody knows the little girl didn't actually have a tumor at the time of the application. Blue Cross doesn't care. Now the parents are looking at how to pay the remaining $60,000 of their daughter's medical bills.

Okay, the Shaeffers and all the others who get shafted by their insurers are real sob stories. But wait a minute. It's not like they lost half a billion dollars of bogus stock options, is it?