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Making matters far worse for the public, already plagued by stagnating wages and good jobs exported to cheap labor countries, is the new bankruptcy legislation. It gutted consumer protection making it much harder to get that protection when it's most needed. The new law gives the predatory credit card companies license to steal even more than they're now doing by making it much harder for ordinary people to seek the bankruptcy protection they used to have. The law was passed through lies and deceit about consumer abuse of the system that needed correcting. In fact, Harvard University researchers found that 90% of personal bankruptcies result from illness, unaffordable medical bills for people without insurance to cover them, job loss, death in the family or divorce - hardly conniving people trying to rip off the credit card companies or lending agencies.David then once again goes on to explain in detail the lies and myths about who benefits and who loses under the new law, the economic conditions for most people making them more vulnerable when trouble strikes, and much more including his sensible solutions to the problems now created.
Chapter Five: Pensions - Workers Actually Could Count on Them Once - But That Was Then, and This Is Now
So even though these companies once agreed in union negotiations to legally binding contract obligations regarding worker benefits to be paid to retirees, they're now seeking legal protection through the courts to back out of them. The courts today are stacked with corporate-friendly judges, but even when companies have no justification for redress, they're able to drag out legal cases for years through appeals so that even if they end up losing, many retirees will have died off waiting and the companies will save millions even after legal expenses which aren't cheap.
Besides fraudulent corporate lawsuits to welsh on their obligations, companies are ingenious in coming up with new ways to cheat their employees. The AP reported one such way in 2002 which was the quiet conversion of the retirement plans of eight million workers to so-called "cash balance" schemes by hundreds of companies. As David explained, these new plans were and are nothing more than a con to let these companies back out of their guarantee to give their workers a lifetime monthly pension and instead offer them one lump-sum payment. The companies getting away with this scam are able to save many millions of dollars because that payment amounts to far less than the original promised benefits which is why they devised this scheme in the first place.
Even the Bush administration tried getting into this act by rolling out what David rightly calls "the granddaddy of all pension rip-off schemes : privatizing Social Security." I've called it the grandest of grand thefts if they're ever able to pull it off. It hardly matters to this administration that this magnificent plan has been "the most successful government initiative" ever in our history and which has lifted many millions of working people out of poverty and made it possible for them to have a decent retirement that otherwise wouldn't have been possible. What the Bush administration proposed doing was to turn this program over to the sharks on Wall Street and let them run it and be able to skim off a bonanza in big fees from retirees who would be their victims and end up with less than they now receive. A University of Chicago economist did the math and estimated that Wall Street would earn between $400 billion and $1 trillion in broker and administrative fees under the Bush mega-ripoff scheme. Thankfully the public balked strongly enough, and for now at least, the administration has backed off. But you can bet they're likely plotting their next move to resurrect what will be their dream scheme if they ever do pull it off. And when they launch their next attempt, it's almost certain they'll again try using the canard that the system is in danger of going bankrupt and only privitizing it can fix it. So far the public hasn't bought this deceit and hopefully won't the next time they try selling it. But David makes it very clear that the future security of millions of working people is in jeopardy through pension and Social Security "reform" (meaning scamming the public to steal our future for corporate gain) unless we the people are vigilant and take steps to fight back. David shows us how.
Chapter Six: Health Care - Present Plans or Lack of Them Are Hazardous to Our Health
Although the government may ignore and deny it, it's beyond dispute this country has a major and unforgivable health care crisis that continues to get worse. Presently 46 million or more people here have no insurance coverage at all, millions more have far too little, and David dramatically points out that 82 million Americans had no health insurance for some period of time between 2003 and 2004. This is happening in a country that spends almost 2.5 times the median average for the industrialized world, and yet the World Health Organization (WHO) ranked the US 37th in the world in "overall health performance" and 54th in the fairness of health care. Moreover, every developed country in the world except the US and South Africa provide free health care for all its citizens paid for though taxes.
David dramatically points out that we may have the best doctors and most advanced medical facilities in the world, but what good is it if they're unavailable to a vast number of the people living here because they can't afford to use them. David goes on to detail much more, explaining that despite the inadequacy of our health care system, the providers of it are some of the most profitable companies in the country - such as the HMOs, the other big insurers and the big drug companies. He also explains that a key reason why we spend so much and get back so little overall is that 15 cents of every dollar we spend on health insurance is skimmed off for "administrative expense." That's just code language for private industry very high profits. Compare that to our government run programs like Medicare which only spends 4 cents of every dollar on these expenses. I'm on Medicare and am very pleased with it except that recipients are being forced to pay an increasingly greater amount for it. The idea is to enable the government to welsh on its obligation to us to divert even more funds to its corporate allies - our loss for their continuing gain.
At the end of WW II, Harry Truman unsuccessfully tried to get Congress to pass a universal health care government run program. He never had a chance to get it through the Congress as the dominant health care industry companies and the legislators shot down his proposal and every new one that came along later to extend universal coverage to everyone. It's not because of the cost, although we were told that's the reason. It's because government owes its allegiance to its big corporate benefactors that won't do anything to deny themselves the right to control the health care delivery process and be able to charge whatever prices they wish for their products and services. They certainly have taken full advantage of that, and the result is the dismal state of our health care system and the high industry profits resulting from it.
As in his other chapters, David does a fine job exposing the lies and myths the public is told to justify a bad system. And he ends the chapter again by offering the kind of common sense solutions a responsible government serving the people would have jumped on and enacted long ago. It's now up to the public to rise up and demand they do it.
Chapter Seven: Prescription Drugs - The Best Advice Is to Stay Well and Not Need Them - Their Cost May Make You Sicker
Here are some of the facts David reports on what I like to call Big Pharma. This industry is one of the most profitable in the country making about 18 cents profit on every dollar of sales; it's aided by government using our tax dollars to fund about one third of all research on new drugs the industry gets at no charge; the industry spends about twice as much on advertising, promotion and administrative costs as they do on R & D to develop new drugs; the prices charged for prescription drugs in the US are inordinately high compared to the rest of the world and are rising at about four times the rate of inflation; these rising costs plus those for most all health services are rising so fast, companies are forcing their employees to pay a greater share of them or are reducing overall health care benefits; and the industry has one of the most powerful and effective trade associations representing their interests (PhRMA - that I spelled a different way above to refer to the companies and not the association) seeing to it that elected officials are well lubricated with campaign contributions and more personal benefits to assure that any legislation hostile to their interests never sees the light of day.
The bottom line is a Congress acting like a "wholly owned subsidiary" of the drug industry and consumers paying dearly for it. And just like other industries covered in the book, the drug giants try to justify their consumer-unfriendly policies with deceit and lies like claiming charging lower prices would mean less innovation and fewer new drugs. They also never mention that easier regulations have allowed them to come to market more quickly with new drugs that later turned out to be unsafe and in some cases resulted in deaths. One drug giant's Vioxx is a stark case in point and one in which the company is now involved in large class-action litigation on behalf of 10,000 consumer plaintiffs plus a second class-action suit on behalf of insurers and HMOs.
The drug industry will also profit handsomely from the new Medicare legislation that is so bad it could only be passed in the middle of the night and then only after enough lawmakers who first voted against it were coerced or bribed to change their mind - a testimony to this industry's influence. Under the plan, Medicare's bulk purchasing power was neutered so the drug companies could charge full, undiscounted prices for their products. The hidden details of this prescription plan for seniors are bad enough to make it worthless for many on Medicare like myself. But the plan is a likely bonanza for the industry and may net them hundreds of billions of dollars including about an extra $139 billion because the government can't negotiate lower prices.
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