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Protection Racketeering is the Growth Industry in the U.S.
A racketeering crime wave is sweeping the United States. It was strategically planned at the conceptual level but with the amount of money being extorted and extracted, self-activated players have jumped into the game overwhelming law enforcement capacity to handle the onslaught.
This racketeering is not street crime. It’s white-collar, protection racketeering on a grand scale. It includes terrorism in all its forms including blowing up buildings, extortion, bribery, fraud, conspiracy, and murder. We are told that the bad guys are Muslims who hang out in the most devastated and primitive regions in the world but who allegedly plan highly sophisticated strategic attacks on us. The solutions to terrorism are always high tech Information Technology related. Does anybody see a problem with this picture?
Congress created this problem and they continue to fund it – paying quadruple and more for the “protection systems” offered by the Information Technology corporations. The terrorism will continue indefinitely because it’s paying off for everybody except the decent, hardworking American citizens who still live in the delusion bubble of America being a country where the values of honesty, integrity, truth, fairness have meaning and value. Faget about it! This is the New America with a New Economy and a New Value Set. In America today, the rackets are the growth industry and the crimes pay very well indeed. It’s not just millions. It’s not just billions. It’s trillions and with no penalties because the government is in partnership with the criminals.
There is no more obvious protection racket in the United States than the health care industry. Congress created the racket. They built it and now the industry has more power than the Congress. That was apparent when Oversight Committee Chairman Dennis Kucinich groveled at the feet of some of the most powerful of the racketeers in the health protection racket in an oversight hearing on Thursday, September 17, 2009.
The Congress created the health care racket when they adopted the philosophy that all corporations have a right to make as much profit as the market will bear without government interference regardless of the nature of the business. The regulations that the Congress does enact are on the operations side, which increases costs, which allows the increases in the margins of profit. It’s a form of corruption from the inside and you have to be an insider to understand how it works.
At it’s most fundamental level, the business of a health insurance company is to manage a pool of money collected from a large group of people to pay for the incidental costs of illness or injury. To determine how much money is needed in the pool to cover incidents of illness or injury, actuaries collect statistics and calculate the odds of occurrences based on the number of people in the pool and the costs for services in the service area. So you could say that the core business functions of health insurance companies are statistical analysis, maintenance of member list and management of the pool of money including investments and disbursements. That’s it. Everything else is just add-on expense.
There was a time in this country when everybody could afford health insurance because the insurance providers were non-profit health insurers. But then Congress “fixed” that. They allowed the large corporations to become self-insured which reduced the size of the risk pools and the capital that the non-profit insurers had to work with. It also reduced the negotiating power of non-profits. The insurers no longer had the clout to keep the prices of the providers at a reasonable rate. That legislative change has had a devastating effect on our economy and the price of health care ever since. As with every other industry that the Congress “fixes” for us, there has been a consolidation with the majority of the health insurance market now being controlled by five insurers –
United Health Aetna Cigna Wellpoint Humana
Since these are ‘for-profit’ corporations, did it ever occur to anyone that they might have significant stock ownership in the ‘for profit’ hospitals? And the ‘for-profit’ health care technology corporations that sell the multimillion-dollar medical equipment? And stock ownership in the pharmaceutical corporations?
But then I guess there is no law against that anymore. But it’s the perfect setup for extortion. And the proof of collusion and corruption is that they are happy to support the health care “reforms” that Congress is proposing provided that the Congress mandates that everybody has insurance and the paradigm in health care shifts from “sick care” to “well care” - meaning that when they print brochures on health living, that will count as benefits paid. If you were offended by the car insurance companies writing laws requiring you to wear a seat belt – just wait until you have mandatory health insurers writing laws telling you how you have to live so that they can increase their profit margins.
I really get so sick of all the stupidity, greed and deceit.
Vicky Davis
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