Rodney Curtis

Haven’t we learned over the years that insurance companies know best? Why, just today I received a phone call from my doctor saying Blue Cross wasn’t allowing me to take a drug she prescribed. I’m glad that a faceless person in a call center somewhere denied me my medicine. Obviously they have access to all the most advanced medical technology in the world and can judge, far better than my doctor, what’s best for me.

Those poor insurance companies. I heard recently that some of their million-dollar executives are having problems sleeping at night. That’s unfortunate. Apparently they’re worried about what will happen when the Supreme Court tackles a challenge to the Affordable Care Act.

Since being laid off by Craig Dubow, a CEO who made 37 million dollars earlier this year, I luckily get to fund my own health insurance and get denied by companies like the appropriately named Humana. A company with such a pleasant, populace-oriented name can’t be all that bad. The guy that rejected my application happily told me over the phone that they don’t have to insure people like me until 2014 when the health care act becomes law. Even though he sounded gleeful to inform me, it must have hurt him inside. I feel bad for him too. Terribly.

Insurance companies have more important worries than accepting people’s claims and paying for their coverage. Like how they can best not comply with the health care act affectionately known as Obamacare. It must take teams of specialists and lobbyists to think up arguments against giving Americans proper coverage. That would keep me up at night for sure.

Thankfully insurance companies have advanced far beyond their original intent, to pool risk and spread out the possible harm of something going awry. In those early days, insurance wasn’t a for-profit business. Thank God they are today since they need to employ all those people in call centers who know more than me and my doctor combined.

A man I know in the insurance business told me recently that affordable health care for everybody is just plain un-American. I whole-heartedly agreed. America shouldn’t be going around providing care for the homeless or the wretched refuse who can’t get a job or are sick. If it was America’s job, this phrase would be written on a monument somewhere: “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me.”

There must be a drug out there that can help the insurance executives sleep better. And if they’re lucky, their minions will approve it so they can begin self-medicating. They shouldn’t have to go through all this rigamarole in order to fight a national law that benefits the poor and huddled masses.

The executive’s worries don’t stop at how to destroy national health care, they have to figure out how to make more money for themselves. They are so underpaid compared to the guy who laid me off. Michael McCallister, the poor Humana CEO’s accumulated wealth is only slightly over 35 million. He’s gotta find some way to make up that two million deficit if he wants to look respectable around the clubhouse.

There is hope, though, for America’s destitute insurance execs. When Aetna’s former CEO Ronald Williams left his job this year, he netted 72 million bucks. That could soften his worries of an unthinkable doomsday where everyone in this country is insured.

The World Health Organization ranked America’s health care system 37th overall. We’re right behind the Dominican Republic and Costa Rica. Maybe if we band together and pay the insurers more money we can raise that standing a notch or two.

Frankly, I see no other way to get better health care for the huddled masses or increase our ranking.

Statue of Liberty photo by Rodney Curtis