Medicare and the Insurance Companies

Dear Insurance Companies,

There is no place for you in our well-functioning Medicare program. Medicare is the public option we want to give the rest of the populace, since you have so horribly abused them with your sky high monthly premiums and your policy of questioning every doctor visit, test, referral to a specialist, or procedure. And who makes these decisions to question every possible charge? Low-level phone-bank bean-counters make these decisions to get between the consumers and their doctors at your direction. How is this better than Medicare? Medicare has never questioned a single decision my doctors and I have made together to manage my healthcare needs. When I had private insurance every decision made by my doctors and me was at first denied, and then had to be negotiated by functionaries with no medical credentials or expertise at the big impersonal insurance company and my doctors office, driving up costs by requiring the hiring of new staff to deal with all the denials of coverage or medicine or referral or procedure or hospitalization. My doctors hate you bastards. So do I. We want you out of the only public option we have. And we are confused about how the hell you insinuated yourself into Medicare in the first place. You are now, once again, driving up costs for all of us. And we are, so far, just the low-income elderly and the disabled. You are everything that is wrong with our economy. Your greed knows no bounds. Your disregard for our well-being is nothing short of criminal negligence. You must be expelled from Medicare before you take it over completely and there isn't even a public option for the neediest and most at-risk disabled among us. You represent a cancer in the system. We need to cut you out before you turn this country into a poor third-world nation with no health care coverage for anyone but the wealthiest few.

I have had a long and detailed conversation with my medicare information personnel and I have been assured that there is no "advantage" in your "Medicare Advantage programs." We do not need you at all. But your dishonest advertising makes most of our citizens believe that they do need one of the "Medicare Advantage" programs being so agressively pushed on us from every source. You have the money to push this program. The government run medicare program does not advertise. That would raise costs to all of us. The government run medicare program does not solicit over the phone or in mailings. That would raise costs to all of us. Why do you have the money to push your "Medicare Advantage" plans? Because you, in the private sector, have raised rates every few months just because you can. Because you have denied coverage for "pre-existing conditions." Because you have doubled premiums in a single month once a diagnosis has been made that will require surgery and ongoing treatment. You are bloodsuckers at best. Get out of Medicare. You offer no "Advantage" and cost all of us a great deal more than our modest public option does.