Jerry Flanagan Quotations

When Wall Street analysts talk about efficiencies, they're talking about more money for HMO profits, not better care.

But those that need affordable health care most can't afford to invest. More than half of those already enrolled in these plans have not put any money in their health savings account.

HMOs and insurers pumping up their coffers at the detriment to seniors is a blight on the Medicare prescription drug benefit and is the last straw of their looting and pillaging of health care.

Requiring something people cannot afford is not a solution to solving the health care crisis.

Recent mergers have given the industry a strangle hold over the health insurance market. With fewer pressures for efficiency and no government oversight of rates, insurers have been given free rein to spend more of our health care dollars on overhead, profit, and administration. The last decade of HMO mergers has taught us that when fewer HMOs dominate the health care market, quality goes down, premiums go up, and patients get short changed. Already, 45 million Americans are uninsured because they cannot afford to pay the insurers' ransom.

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to realize that a handful of insurance companies with a stranglehold on the market can raise rates.

What the HMOs can't explain is why premiums are increasing twice as fast as hospital and physician costs.

This is a national problem. Insurance companies sell you a policy and then they break their promises and they cherry-pick and only insure those that are healthy. Dare you get sick, your coverage is revoked. This makes a mockery of health insurance.

At a time when 6.5 million Californians cannot afford their health care and millions more are underinsured, it is obscene to allow executives to feed at the trough of huge cash and stock payouts.

If the pill looks any differently than you are normally used to seeing it, different shape, different color, take it to a pharmacist.

The health care system is moving to a privately-owned 'Single Payer' system where patients will have fewer choices, less leverage and higher costs. The number of the uninsured will surely increase has the insurers' control increases. If we are going to have a Single Payer system, why not let the government pay a lot less for better care instead of turning the health care system over to private insurers that take 20 percent for overhead and profit.

A handful of insurance companies control the market and raise rates at will, far above the value of the insurance they're selling.

The drug industry dispensed $30 million in campaign contributions during the last election -- including $1 million to George W. Bush's campaign. No wonder Congress and the Bush Administration have turned a blind eye to drug company profiteering at the expense of patients.

The conception of the idea is there, but the devil is going to be in the details.