Corporate Death Spiral

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
new york city, New York, United States of America (Free-Press-Release.com) July 13, 2011 -- We often hear that corporations “get away with murder,” such as when the banks got bailed out and at worst faced meaningless fines, but many people are unaware of the many ways corporations are legally permitted to murder people. And we have virtually no recourse, at least through the current political system. In the worlds of for-profit healthcare, military contracting and privatized water supplies, corporations can murder with impunity.

In his book Deadly Spin, an Insurance Company Insider speaks out on how Corporate PR is Killing Healthcare and Deceiving Americans, Wendell Potter discusses a legal weapon called ERISA. It is one of the most Kafkaesque mechanisms in America, and that’s saying something in the post-9/11 era. Originally designed to help workers protect their pensions during the 1970s, ERISA, or the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974, has been transformed into a tool to make insurance companies immune from lawsuits for refusing to provide healthcare.

Potter devotes a chapter of his book to the story of Nataline Sarkisyan, a little girl who was ruthlessly denied coverage for a transplant by CIGNA and died. Her family tried to sue, in vain. Because ERISA is a federal law, it is exempt from state laws, such as consumer protections and benefit mandates, and it renders state insurance commissioners powerless to regulate ERISA-protected plans. Consequently, “the 130 million Americans enrolled in ERISA-protected plans,” Potter writes, “cannot sue their insurance company or employer in state court if they have been denied coverage for a treatment or procedure, as Nataline was.”

And those who attempt to sue in federal court are wasting their time: “Few lawyers sue insurers in federal court because, under ERISA, the only remedy their clients are entitled to receive—even if a judge and jury agree they’ve been wronged—are the costs the insurer refused to cover,” according to Potter. So this exempts insurers from paying “punitive damages, and compensation for pain, suffering or lost wages.” And if you die, “the insurer cannot be ordered to pay anything to the patient’s survivors.” As Jamie Court, author of Making a Killing, explains, “Imagine that the penalty for bank robbery was limited to giving back the stolen money. No jail time, no fines, just pay the money back—and only if you are caught. To top it off, the repaid money would be interest free. Would bank robbery increase under such circumstances? That’s the situation HMO’s and insurers enjoy under ERISA.”

This evil policy remains in place because the public is largely unaware of it, and whatever they do know is largely spun by the insurance PR machine, which creates front groups, such as the National Coalition of Benefits, to defeat any attempts to abolish ERISA through fear-mongering campaigns about how reform would prove too costly for insurers, who would be forced to deny healthcare to hundreds of thousands of patients.

Military contractors have similar freedoms. In his book Blackwater, the Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army, Jeremy Scahill discusses how Paul Bremer, the U.S. administrator initially in charge of Iraq’s reconstruction, issued a decree called Order 17, granting immunity to all contractors from prosecution. “Not a single armed contractor, for Blackwater or any other firm, has ever been charged in any court anywhere with any crime against an Iraqi,” Scahill writes. This “climate of total impunity” did not come about by chance, according to Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, the “very purpose is to brutalize and strike fear into the people of Iraq.”

The Washington Post has reported that, “a former Blackwater guard who spent nearly three years in Iraq, said his 20-man team averaged ‘four or five’ shootings a week.” The only repercussions, if there are any, are fines and firings...

For full article check out my blog:

http://thebloodycrossroads.com/

Blackwater     corporations     ERISA     health insurance corporations     iraq     lobbying     privatization     wendell potter