As I have approached the age of retirement from full-time work as a professor, my spouse and I have received in the mail a steady stream of adventisements for health care plans with the name of a HMO (Health Maintenance Organization) attached to the term “Advantage”: Kaiser Advantage; Blue Shield Advantage. Ah! I ask myself: but to whose advantage? The allure of details in these advertisements would suggest that it is to your advantage (convenience, low cost, etc.), but this is merely a come-on to disguise one of the more long-running bait-and-switch operations legally at work in the U.S.
Health care in the United States, in fact, is in the hands of insurance companies and pharmaceutical industry to a degree that can only be called a Ponzi scheme. An HMO is not a “health maintenance” organization. It is a PROFIT-MAINTENANCE organization. Dozens of people working for Kaiser earn more than a million dollars a year. The CEO of Kaiser makes 20 million a year. In such a profit-generating system, The primary goal of any organization in which a large number of individuals are that well remunerated ccan only be a matter of methods that result in a massive surplus of funds. An individual’s well-being is merely a secondary side-effect that is more a matter of chance than of calculated cathexis meant to alleviate the suffering and distress of a patient. One is, unfortunately, assigned a doctor or physician assistant in a manner that resembles the red-lining that afflicted housing distribution in urban areas such as Los Angeles.
HMO Health Care is a Ponzi scheme in which the maximum amount of money is collected from the maximum number of people possible, while of course only rendering the amount of service needed to keep the scheme intact. The operational culture of “pre-authorization” is the primary means by which this gap allows those who run the scheme to be very well rewarded financially. The success of this particular Ponzi scheme is that the siphoned wealth of hundreds of thousands is distributed in a manner that avoids any appearance of outright fraud. Unlike the classic Ponzi scheme, such as the one Bernie Madoff is famous for, in which an extremely limited number of people avail themselves of a mind-boggling reservoir of money, HMO schemes know that the secret to perpetuating themselves requires the caution of restraint. No one individual should be disproportionately accruing exorbitant wealth. Rather, the guardrail on greed is that “there’s plenty to go around, so let’s not get ostentatiously avaricious.”
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About Bill Mohr