Haunted by US Healthcare Inc - $27.9 Million/Year Aetna CEO Threatened Obamacare Pullback in Apparent Retaliation for Government Anti-Trust Litigation

ConclusionSo the story of US Healthcare Inc, and its merger with Aetna showed a repeating pattern: unfulfilled promises of wonders to come, angry health professionals complaining of bad health care, while the corporate insiders become rich.  So do we really think that the proposed Aetna Humana merger would " Drive Consumer-Focused, High-Value Health Care? "  If so, could I sell you a bridge from Brooklyn to Manhattan?This case shows how we have turned health insurance over to large for-profit corporations, in an era of laissez faire capitalism and light touch regulation, and in an era in whichmanagerialism enables the leadership of health care organizations by business trained people with little understanding of or sympathy for the health care calling, but who can get rich by pursuing short-term revenue, and can deploy armies of marketers and public relations specialists to obfuscate what is going on.Why on earth should we expect by continuing in the same direction we will now actually produce lower-cost, higher-quality care?One big problem is that many people in the US now think of commercialized health care as the norm, and cannot conceive of any alternatives.  Even our recent attempt at health care reform, the Affordable Care act, depended on the continued dominance of health insurance by for-profit corporations.True health care reform would consider alternatives.  At least we could start with much tougher regulation of commercial health care.  For...
Source: Health Care Renewal - Category: Health Management Tags: Aetna concentration of power deception executive compensation health insurance managed care organizations mergers Source Type: blogs