ICEBERG, RIGHT AHEAD!
DRAPER’S PAPER ROUTE
ICEBERG, RIGHT AHEAD!
by Adam Carroll Draper
In my best George Carlin: “This is a bulletin, bulletin, bulletin! The sun did not come up this morning! Huge cracks have appeared in the earth’s surface! Big rocks are falling out of the sky! Details later on Action Central News!”
Meant in the same tone as Carlin’s skit (and I am sure this comes as a Casablanca-like shock to anyone reading it): we have problems with health insurance in America! I can say that health insurance became an unsustainable financial burden for me once it was pronounced affordable by the federal government in 2010. Most people do not see as many of the repercussions of that amazing affordability as me. I have either defended or sued insurance companies for over thirty years now. Let me just say this: “Houston, we have a problem.” However, the problem is with our entire insurance industry, not just health insurance. Saying that this system is under intense strain is an understatement. I mean, the sounds of metal fatigue on the Titanic just before it split can be described as signs of intense strain.
A couple of stories from cases I recently handled may offer some anecdotal perspective. One client of mine settled a case in which she had over $80,000 in medical bills, all with a local hospital. Medicaid paid around a fifth of the bill (which is pretty good for Medicaid). The hospital wrote off the rest of the bill. Health Care providers must write off the part of their bills that Medicaid does not pay. Who pays for what gets written off? How is that loss absorbed? This is just one case I thought of off the top of my head, and it is not a particularly egregious example of what literally happens thousands of times a day at a large hospital. How do they stay in business?
Another client of mine was in a car accident four years ago in which a sweet, little, 90 year-old lady turned in front of her at an intersection. It was a fairly bad wreck in which my client’s car was totaled. My client broke her foot, right around her big toe. She still has (four years later) around $2,000 in medical bills. The sweet, little old lady’s insurance company refused to pay anything, so my client had to file suit. It happens. This particular insurance company notoriously denies liability and forces people to file suit. This is not a huge case and lots of people with similar cases have a hard time finding lawyers willing to litigate for them because the time and money it takes to do so makes no financial sense. Insurance companies know this, of course. Fortunately, my client has a financially myopic lawyer (otherwise pronounced “stu-pid”), who has a habit of not letting insurance companies do this to his clients - even though it bringing those cases forward in court literally costs him more than he gets out of them. (I will be stopping that because my loose grip on sanity requires it). By the way, this insurance company is one of those you see on TV, telling you all about what good hands you are in because they are on your side, like a good neighbor, who saves you tons of money after you fall for their incessant, cute but deceptive ads. Anyway, after filing suit and going through a lot of mess in which the well-advertised super-protecting insurance company put its now 94 year-old client in danger of having to go to court, they offered my client $2,000 to settle. Yay! That was for everything: her medical bills, lost wages and even for her old car (which had been seized and sold for salvage by the lot where it was towed four years earlier). My client is not a wealthy person. She works every day (cleaning houses) and is just struggling to keep from going under. She took the money.
That was the wind-up. Here’s the pitch. In this last case, the hospital will get nothing! I could go on all day.
Julius Caesar wrote eight volumes of commentaries on his wars. If I were to write commentaries on my wars with insurance companies, however, mine would be more comparable to Don Quixote’s exploits than Caesar’s, so I will not be writing commentaries. This is more like a lament, or possibly the screed of someone suffering concussions from repeatedly tilting at windmills. We are victorious time after time, but it does not matter how often we win. It does not change the insurance companies. The point to writing this, however, is to say that I am seeing something new these days. There is too much money being written off. Something has got to give somewhere.
Without just droning on and on, I am saying that this system is groaning with sounds like metal fatigue.
Most people do not realize that our whole financial system (banking, investments, bonds, securities – all of it) is underwritten by insurance, called reinsurance. Did you get a look at the market this week? It is so bad that the Federal Reserve is considering a coordinated central bank bailout.
Let me put it this way, do you think that Coronavirus concerns really caused all this? It’s not just the problem with health insurance, or health care, or student loans, or credit card debt, or the absurd amount of our national debt – or even the fact that we have decided to make the public responsible for the losses of companies deemed too big to fail. The whole global financial system is in danger. Insurance companies provide foundational support for that system.
There are far too many aspects of this to list here. The world may be on the verge of financial collapse. We may avert it… again. Some people stand to benefit from collapse, however. You will be able to tell who those beneficiaries are by what they try to do with the crisis they can’t let go to waste.
Can you hear the metal fatigue on the Titanic now? Don’t panic. Pray. Keep your wits about you. You will recognize the global totalitarian technocrats when they demand your liberty for your survival. If they come for your freedom and America’s national sovereignty with an offer of safety and global economic community, resist them. If they offer socialism as security, remember what you just read.