I saw Bill Moyers Journal with former medical insurance executive Wendell Potter last night. When I was watching The Bill Moyers show scenes from "The Insider" and Russell Crowe playing Dr. Victor DeNoble testifying against his former tobacco company employers kept popping up in my mind.
The business plans of the tobacco industry and the medical insurance industry are very similar. They both sell a product that exploits the people that buy their product. They are both forced to lie in advertising their product and have extreme lobbing to keep their industry as unregulated as possible. And both the tobacco industry and the medical insurance industries real customers that their business model is compelled to satisfy are Wall Street hedge fund brokers.
One very revealing statement by Wendell Potter is that our government run Medicare system has about a 3% overhead or about 97% of the incoming funds are used for patient care. On the other hand medical insurance companies pocket about 20% of incoming funds and use about 80% for patient care. And if that target percentage for patient care slips a little to say 81% they could loose very big on the hedge fund market and their stock price on Wall Street could plummet.
Now the medical insurance industry has it's version of Dr. Victor DeNoble testifying in Congress against the tobacco industry executives. I wonder if Russell Crowe will play Wendell Potter in the movie.
Bill Moyers Journal; watch and listen:
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/07102009/profile.html
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