Well… There you go again Monty… Spin away from the tort facts... And I knew about the corporate sponsored sky-boxes… I purposely left them out of my response as bait… and you jumped on it like a hawk on a June bug…
I’ve really got to thank you for being such a great straight man and for being so honest in bringing out two of the most deeply rooted pillars of the liberal mantra… Demonizing Big Corporations and The Destruction of Capitalism.
Liberals demonize big business and the managers who run them for the simple reason that they can’t control them. Liberals despise capitalism for the same reason and they think their socialist ways of running government are more efficient so they should be applied to the publicly held business corporations as well. Liberals must be in control…
That’s the fundamental tenet of Socialism, Fascism, and Marxism. These ideologies profess that people should have the power not big business who use the principals capitalism and a free market… but the liberal elite thinkers who know better must lead the people.
The liberal elite know best who the evil capitalists are that make people work for the big corporations that don’t pay people enough money… That’s why liberals want to empower the unions… to make sure the people get paid more money for their work instead of letting free market forces determine the wage. Above all, the liberal elite want to destroy capitalism and the evil CEOs who run these big corporations.
Please don’t get me wrong, I’m just as passionate as you are in ferreting out white-collar corruption and I’m relieved to see Madoff is finally in jail for keeps. His theft of over $65 Billion dollars has permanently damaged the lives of thousands of investors including major retirement funds and charities that serve hundreds of thousands of people.
Madoff’s was the single most costly white-collar crime in the history of the stock market and he’ll stay in prison for the rest of his life. I’m sure you’ll agree with me that all white-collar criminals should be treated the same way. Moreover, I think you’ll also agree that the Justice department should go after Madoff’s wife and the rest of his family for aiding and abetting him during this crime. They are just as guilty as a bank robber’s getaway driver, so they should be stripped of their ill-gotten gains from Madoff’s Ponzi scheme and sent to prison as well.
So let’s get back to those evil publicly owned health care corporations and the evil capitalists who run them that you feel are so inefficient and so crass as to outsource their labor and only give policy holders fifty cents worth of care for every dollar paid in health care insurance premiums…
Why did these evil health care corporations outsource so many positions overseas? The answer is simple. Big government taxes these health care corporations at the highest corporate tax rate in the world… 35%, and big government wants to enact even more tax through Cap and Trade, and that doesn’t include the state and local taxes these evil health care corporations must pay.
In order to stay in business, these healthcare corporations must reduce labor costs by outsourcing the labor off shore in order to operate at a profit and not go out of business… That my friend, is Business Administration 101…
Have you called the airlines lately and spoken to someone in India… How about calling Microsoft tech support? Hmm answered in India too… Dell Computer or HP? India… I’m confident you can call just about any major US based corporation and find some of their support has been outsourced off shore for the same reason… These corporations want to stay in business and not go into bankruptcy like GM or Chrysler will be forced to because they let the unions set the extravagant wages, retirement, and health care benefits.
So let’s get back to the health care policyholder that only gets 50 cents worth of health care out of every dollar paid for health insurance… Right away we can see that 35 cents worth of the health care he didn’t get for his dollar went to the federal government in the form of corporate income tax. Another 5 to 7 cents went to State and local corporate income tax… Hmmm… Now that evil health care corporation is down to 8 to 10 cents profit on every dollar it earned in sales of medical insurance premiums…
In reality, these evil health care corporations get to keep even less in profit… Let’s take the big dog and most evil of all the publicly traded managed health care corporations, UnitedHealth Group (UNH). As you can see from the financial chart below, UNH managed a net profit margin of 3.67%
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Wow… The evil owners of UNH made $81.19 Billion dollars in total sales, but the federal government came along and took $28.42 Billion dollars in corporate tax off the top… And the State and local tax collectors took another $4 Billion dollars. Somewhere in there, the UNH management had to pay for their employees and all the other overhead costs… and of course they had to pay for the medical procedures and medications the policyholder needed… When all is said and done, UNH got to keep $2.98 Billion dollars in profit… Or did they? Well not exactly…
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As you can see from the chart above, as a publicly traded managed health care corporation it’s the shareholders that own 99% of UNH… The “insiders” that include members of the UNH board of directors, CEO, COO, CFO and other corporate officers own 1%. So who really owns UNH? Well, as you can see the biggest shareholders are institutional investors and mutual funds…
And who are these institutions… why these are the firms that manage the retirement funds, 401k, and IRAs that the people expect to draw on after they retire because they know they can’t live on Social Security… Hmmm interesting… And who owns the mutual funds??? Why the people do… At least the people who worked for a living and saved their money so they could invest in UNH or a mutual fund…
BTW… If you check the 10 Largest Publicly Traded Managed Care Companies at the following link and look up their financial statements, you’ll find they all operate with around a 4% profit margin.
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So let’s get this straight… The people that earned the money and took the risk of investing it either directly in UNH, or a mutual fund… only to have the federal government that takes no risks, come along and tax the dividends from UNH or the mutual funds as regular income, and then the federal government taxes any profits from the sales of shares in either as capital gains at the present rate of 15%... So the federal government gets to eat into the profits too…
But wait… The Marxist trained community organizer in the White House thinks a 15% capital gains tax rate is too low… He wants to take more money from the people who invested in UNH… He wants to raise the capital gains tax to 20% and take the extra tax revenue he takes from the UNH investors and give it to other people who don’t work and illegal aliens so he can redistribute wealth… or use it to make a down payment on Universal Health Care… How egalitarian… Well no… that’s actually Socialism, Fascism, or Marxism depending on how you see it… but it sure as hell isn’t Capitalism.
So how does the Marxist trained community organizer in the White House plan to do that without raising any “new tax” on people earning less than $250,000 as he promised… Simple… he tells princess Pelosi and her politburo to let the Bush tax cuts on an “old tax” expire at the end of 2010… and that lets the anointed one hold his nose high and claim he’s kept his campaign promise… What a clever devil… How honorable…
BTW, if you want to see what letting the Bush tax cuts expire will cost you in increased capital gains tax… go to the following link, but remember that’s not the only tax cut that expires:
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Ah… You probably thought I forgot about the sky-box and all the slick glossy flyers the evil health care corporation purchased… Well that’s called advertising… You see in a free market where evil health care corporations compete with each other for customers… (and the operable word here is competition), the company that offers the best health care plan at the lowest price gets the most clients… That’s if they’re able to advertise that advantage to potential buyers of their health care services.
A lot of people owe their jobs to these advertising costs… The Ad firm, the printers, all the good people that work at the stadium cleaning and servicing the sky-box… And you want to put all these good people out of work because you don’t think the evil health care corporation should be allowed to advertise?
Now you claim that government can provide health care more efficiently, so lets look at the Veterans Administration. This is health care run by the federal government… According to their own report, the VA received appropriations of $92.7 Billion dollars in 2008. They also had, collections totaling $2.4 billion in 2008. Their own report also states that VA facilities treated a total of 5,500,000 patients in 2008. Doing the simple math…
($95.1 Billion VA Cost/5.5 million patients treated at all VA facilities)…
Well… that works out to an equivalent insurance cost per year, per VA patient of $17,290. That’s not very efficient when you compare it to the average annual cost of $7900* per person in managed health care premiums paid to the evil publicly owned health care corporations… Again, I suggest you talk with any patient treated at the nearest VA facility and ask them what they thought of the health care they received…
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Getting back to the evil CEOs who cheat their people and the share holders who own their publicly traded corporations…
What would you say should be done with an evil CEO of a failing corporation that lost over $21 billion that also handed out over $3 Billion dollars in bonuses a week before being taken over by another corporation that received $24 Billion in bailout money? Someone should go to jail… Right?
And how about another evil CEO and two other evil senior officers that cooked the accounting books to show a significantly higher profit than an actual loss so they could make their performance goals and be paid handsome bonuses?
What should be done to that evil CEO who cooked the books in order to receive a total compensation of $91.1 million that including $52.6 million in bonuses for doing this; and his CFO who earned $30.8 million that including $16.8 million in bonuses who helped him; and a third officer who received $7.3 million, of which some $3.5 million was bonus money, who also helped?
I think you’ll agree with me, these three criminals should be brought to trial, and if found guilty, they should be stripped of the nearly $130 Million in ill-gotten gains and be sent to prison like Madoff… Right? That would be justice wouldn’t it?
Well… not so fast. What if these last three evil capitalists got off with just a kiss… That would be a travesty of justice and I’m sure that like me, you would want more punitive action taken against these evil corporate capitalists and white-collar criminals.
But what if one of the evil corporate capitalists was none other than Franklin Raines, the CEO of Fannie Mae from 1998 to 2004 who directed the purchase of over half of the toxic subprime loans to meet his bonus quota… What if this subprime experiment in social engineering resulted in the largest financial crisis in the history of the world… and that this crisis has already cost us over $2 Trillion dollars… not to mention the loss of half our 401k and IRAs
And what if Rains’ getaway drivers were none other than Senator Chris Dodd and Congressman Barney Frank… Chairman of two most powerful housing and banking committees charged with the responsibility to oversee the operation of Fannie Mae…
And what if Raines made political contributions to these two… And what if the top three recipients of his political contributions were Chris Dodd, Barney Frank, and none other than the Marxist trained community organizer now in the White House?
Think about it… Think about honor, principals, and values… Think about what’s best for our great Nation… Then Act!
Take care,
V/R, Batch