Happy Mother's Day from America's Health Insurance Plans and Mr. Baucus

[Joanne98]

Wow. America's Health insurance Plan's (AHIP) czar -- and the woman our Congress and president have anointed as the nation's architect of health reform -- has offered a gift to all of America's moms and women. The health insurance industry will stop charging you more - they'll stop discriminating against you - so long as all of you are legally forced to buy their product.
It sounds to me a little like the old saw, "When did you stop beating your wife?" But then when I really thought about it, it made me sicker and sadder and more acutely aware of exactly what this nation's leaders think of all of the mothers and daughters in the land this Mother's Day 2009.

Here's how the New York Times' Robert Pear wrote it, "Insurance companies offered Tuesday to end the practice of charging higher premiums to women than to men for the same coverage.

Karen M. Ignagni, president of America's Health Insurance Plans, a trade group, made the offer in testifying before the Senate Finance Committee."

Yes sir and yes maam, Mr. Pear. Karen's going to stop beating us real soon. I don't buy that for a moment until they actually go all the way back and acknowledge the fact that the men who impregnated the women charged more for their gender-based ability to be impregnated are made to pay up for all the losses women have suffered at the hands of this unscrupulous industry.

Never mind for one moment that the single payer point of view was systematically shut out of that hearing and nearly all others (as evidenced by the arrests of eight advocates this week at the same hearing - though Mr. Pear chose not to report on those arrests, favoring to lead his piece with an Ignagni tribute).

If we could go back and try to fix the damage from the admitted industry discriminatory practices, how do we charge for the lost lives? The moms who buried children they couldn't afford to buy insurance for? The moms who suffered severe illness and unthinkable pain because Karen and crew deemed them uninsurable?

Now they want to charge women the same as men for this defective product that has been allowed to cause hundreds of thousands of women and kids to suffer?

I've heard some friends in political circles say that Karen Ignagni and AHIP are not the real problem in this health care travesty of a U.S. healthcare system. Some say it's the Dems and the Congress that fail to act that are the real problem, that Karen is just doing the job she's paid so very well to do.

Can't buy that one. It would be like folks saying Hitler wasn't the real problem behind the Holocaust and that the folks who ignored him or feared him were really to blame.

Karen and AHIP have given us exactly the same sort of death and destruction as any of the other major human rights disasters over the past century have done, including the Holocaust. These people are the architects of pain and of long and prolonged suffering for millions of women and kids and families. All for the almighty buck.

Continued>>>
http://www.opednews.com/articles/Happy-Mother-s-Day-from-Am-by-Donna-Smith-090509-432.html