Care for a little health care

If I had a lot of stock in a major health insurance company I would be so pissed!
If I got a big bonus because I have a job with a major health insurance provider in the risk management department I would be so pissed!
If I was the CEO of a major health insurance corporation I would be so busy with Legal and Marketing figuring how to circumvent any new regulations that could effect stock prices and executive bonuses.
If I were a politician I would be trying to figure where to get the camopain money I will lose when I vote for a health bill I can no longer prevent passing.
Were I HR director I would be crunching numbers so I would be ready to lead the way to minamised expoisure to litigation.

If I were a person with a job that includes health insurance at ever increasing rates with ever increasing co pays I would not have a clue what to think, but I would be seriously concerned with what is about to happen

Now after our leader spake forthwright and diligent the law that shall come to pass we rejoice in the certinty that wrong shall be made right.
I honestly don't see the problem.
Medacare works great. All doctors and hospitals take it. Let's just put everyone on medicare at birth.
Yea yea I heard that there is some funding problem with medicare but it comes out of my check and we can always get more money from the treasurey. Why they made up a trillon bucks just last year.
Adaven

The everchanging story

The link below is to a interesting story about financial manipulation. It is a little extreme as one would expect from Rolling Stone, but not at all that really unbelievable. It strikes me as what one must expect from capitalism taken as an end in itself.

Business began as trade. It works as give and take over time and distance and has a balance that provides opportunity for growth. When there is take with no give it becomes plunder and leaves only ruin. Conquest became a better alternative to plunder as it left business intact. Trade is needed if you are to have empire.

When we get to today! The only empires left are Financial ones. They have no borders and no allegiance to any country or nation.
The information age has made time compress times 1000. No investment can be long. Only Strip-mining makes sense. Ethics? Pleeeeeesse! Bonuses now now bonuses.

So here we are. Serial plunder is now the best business stragity.
Actually it is a bit more complicated than that. http://CNBC.com has a great report on how we got to where we are. http://www.cnbc.com/id/31187744
Work your way through it and be amazed.
Adaven

The Great American Bubble Machine : Rolling Stone

 

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/29127316/the_great_american_bubble_machine

Six months later

What an amazing ride it has been. I find it hard to write anymore because things are so fractaled. New Word! Really, if you drill down through the news and all the events you can kinda see patterns repeat. The dayly dead bodie count is now usually two per million / square miles of pop denencity or some other stat is ticle nonsence like the spelling in this sentence.
I really think there are some bankers somewhere laughing their asses off making jokes about CDS CDO SPM TARP and other letter groups used to cover up the greatest wealth theft that could be imagined. Bernie looks like a girl scout swiping a cookie out of each box.
Just where do you think the money has gone? Stocks? Well now really a stock is worth only what you can sell it for. After the dot com bubble you would kinda think all the money lost would make investors leery of a "make easy money" environment but NO! Truth is a lot of money was made in the dot com time. Some gotta win some gotta lose good time Charley got screwed but his broker had multiplies. Ya see the very first fish monger, back in the stone age realized that every time a clam changed hands a bit of shell could be chipped off and enough chips would look just like a real clam. The concept of getting something for nothing was born. It came to be called banking and was the beginning of the "dark side".
I am absolutely serious. Pre-people surly killed each over food or water or sex or territory just like any other animal but competition for an idea was what really kick started civilization. Now we had concepts to deal with and after a couple hundred-thousand years the rulers of the dark side were looking for the next angle.
Unrealistic valuations via dot com stock offers were cool but the "vig" (that is the something for nothing part) wasn't all that huge. They realized that the concept of inflating something beyond any reasonable level could bring gigantic profit if it was based on something really large and widespread.
Now back at the beginning of the dark side, one of the things we killed each other over was territory and as our brains developed, out came the concept of "Real Estate"
which is the purest form of "Something for nothing"
Well as you can tell it was jumped on like a [ insert something obscene ]
And to show what strip miners they were, as they were pumping up values and getting the vig for the lones made with other peoples money(like my and your 401 or retirement) they invented vapor investments like colaterized swapped obligation default derivative defecates and soaked up more and more available hopes and expectations and promises, till it all collapsed in a heap of denials and excuses.

They say we will recover. Everything will go back to how it was before. I don't think so. I think they just don't get it. The way we have been doing things will not work anymore. The world is too big too fast and much too interrelated for all the different dark sides to coexist as they have.
Adaven