I helped write a preservation ordinance once and discovered in my research that you really need to write a clause in there forbidding teardowns while the ordinance is being considered, otherwise there’s always some asshole who will invest a ton of money in destroying his building just to prove a point to the city council about what he thinks of the proposal of the measure.<\/p>\n
So there may be many who will be surprised to discover insurers doing things like ceasing to write insurance policies on children in order to avoid a provision of the health insurance reform bill that will kick in later this year and force them to cover children who are already sick, and there may even be those, like the author of this AP piece<\/a>, who call it an “unintended consequence,” but not me.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n I call it utterly typical and completely predictable corporate bullshit. A chat with a handful of consumers – maybe a focus group of reasonably intelligent consumers – who have had dealings with the Death by Spreadsheet industry in the past would have clued lawmakers in to the fact that these people are ingenously creative when it comes to thinking up new ways to screw the consumer out of coverage. And although they usually like to take your dollars in the form of premiums first, if they have to exclude you up front, so be it.<\/p>\n Look for a lot of new ways the insurers will “get even” (i.e. place themselves precisely back in the position of raking in lots of dollars while acting as America’s Death Panels merrily deciding who needs to die in order to keep their profit margins healthy.)<\/p>\n This is what we wrought when we chose to continue our for-profit health care system instead of reforming it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I helped write a preservation ordinance once and discovered in my research that you really need to write a clause in there forbidding teardowns while the ordinance is being considered, otherwise there’s always some asshole who will invest a ton of money in destroying his building just to prove a point to the city council […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[78],"tags":[20,330,10,331,463],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.progressivefox.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1778"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.progressivefox.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.progressivefox.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.progressivefox.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.progressivefox.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1778"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.progressivefox.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1778\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1781,"href":"http:\/\/www.progressivefox.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1778\/revisions\/1781"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.progressivefox.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1778"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.progressivefox.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1778"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.progressivefox.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1778"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}