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News from NASRO

JUNE 11, 2009

NASRO Finds No Representatives Among the Health Care Industry Groups At the Table of Federal Health Care Reform

We are prepared to be deeply disappointed by the results of federal health care reform in 2009. When we look at all the groups at the table we see the latest version of the pigs eating at the trough of our income. Their end product is extremely poor for the money, really no different than corrupt major banks or incompetent auto companies.

Despite these favorable conditions for grassroots organizing, many of the liberal and groups from the left in the U.S. are absent from the struggle for single payer health care at this critical time. Worrying about the next campaign or some internal political question is escaping into romantic notions divorced from the economic reality that working Americans face.

NASRO in the weeks ahead will be redoubling its efforts to promote our health care reform education and action agenda. We see who is working at coalition building on the ground and who is busy building cottage industries of talk shops. To that end, we will be joining with Jobs with Justice, the organization that represents what is left of the workers movement in the U.S. to see that an alternative to the mainstream health insurance and health care big business is heard.

The Obama administration is working from a position of expediency to negotiate a deal that will please the interest groups that all pretend to want to control costs. Here is where these interest groups belong.

Health Insurance Companies deserve to be forced out of business for failing to control premium costs.

For Profit Health Care Corporations need to be transformed back into being and really functioning as non-profit organizations.

Doctors need to become professional employees of the federal government. For all its problems the federal government is less threatening than private industry or state government.

Prescription Drug Companies need to be subject to strict regulation and patent law reform, with their advertising to consumers made illegal.

Medical Supply Companies need to have their sales and marketing tightly controlled, with the participation of medical providers limited.

Whatever it takes to implement these changes is worth it. If they were made, we would wake up in the same country, but a much better one when it comes to affordable health care outcomes for all Americans.

May 23, 2009

Time For a New Economic Model to Be Developed Is Now

While the action of the Obama Administration has somewhat calmed the population into hoping that the economy will soon be recovering, we can not return to a sense of normalcy because the current economic model is unstable and unsustainable.

CNBC and the professional investor community would like for small producers and workers to quickly regain their faith in the old system because of what may turn out to be a short lived rally in the stock market, while housing prices continue to decline back to 2001 levels, entirely wiping out the recent massive gains that seemed so solid. The retirement fund loses of people over the age of 40 should lead practical and pragmatic people to question the failure of a business ideology may take 25 years to recover from.

Most importantly, job loses, the lagging indicator, keep rising. Last year NASRO predicted unemployment of 10% by the end of 2009 and that seemed like an outrageous prediction. The Federal Reserve last week revised their projections of 2009 year end unemployment to be 9.6%. It is not a question of being negative, it is a question of being proactive and insisting on the type of transformational change that goes beyond rescuing incompetent companies such as GM, Chrysler, Bank of America and Citicorp.

May 20, 2009

Health Care Industry Groups Can Not Be Trusted to Control Costs By 2 Trillion Dollars Over the Next 10 Years

The health care industry represents about 17% of gross domestic product and have unimaginable power over our economy and our political system. Now that change is facing them with a lose of their power, they will say anything to maintain their monopoly power.

NASRO encourages Americans to keep the pressure on the Congress and the Obama administration, including taking direct action to demand enforceable price controls over the health care industry and greater federal government control over the industry. Our future depends on rolling back big business financial and ideological control over the the health care industry and return it to being a truly non-profit industry.

They are the target of our discontent and our daily action. How many rate increases by people have to receive before they stand up for themselves and blame the organizations responsible for so much misery. Nothing less than a full economic recovery and our future economic stability depends on these changes being implemented.

April 17, 2009

Case/Schiller January 2009 Housing Index Measurement of Housing Price Declines and How Far Back Housing Prices Have Fallen in Key Markets.

NASRO expects the bursting of the housing bubble will take prices across the board, back to 2001 levels, wiping out trillions of more dollars in assets of U.S. home owners. Here is how far the housing market has fallen back in a few different cities. The dates are all different.

Metro Area    Date

Boston          April 2003

Charlotte       Dec. 2005

Los Angeles    Sept 2003

San Diego      Sept 2002

San Fran        November 2001

Washington    March 2004

Portland         August 2005

April 15, 2009

Who In Washington Is Protecting Sallie Mae, Another Monopoly Enter prize. This One Helping To In debt Students For Generations?

Rarely can enlightened self interest lead us to remember the joint progressive impulses of both Bill Clinton and Barak Obama, who both strongly stated their abhorrence of the predatory lending practices allowed by the U.S. Congress to continue on with the corrupt student lending practices of loan broker/bank called Sallie Mae.

The budget passed by the Democratic Congress ignored President Obama's request for a new system of direct lending by the U.S. Department of Education.

For example, a NASRO member recently showed our staff the interest charged on a student law school loans taken out in 1990 and 1991, that showed $631 paid for the year 2008 in interest and $1,529 in principal payments made to Sallie Mae. This compared to a U.S. Department of Education Direct Loan that showed 2008 annual payments of $10.29 paid for interest and $960 for the loan principal. Student loan debt is making indentured servants of many students because in part they are being unfairly taken advantage of by private student loan lenders.

April 14, 2009

Goldman Sacks Attempts to Escape Federal Regulation

Earlier this year the U.S. taxpayer money was funneled through AIG to pay Goldman Sacks $13 billion dollars as part of an insurance claim against the losses suffered from their unregulated financial products.

Now after being transformed from being an investment bank to become a bank holding company, and dropping from their financial reports the terrible results from the month of December 2008, and suffering one fiscal quarter of accountability and transparency, they have had enough and want to pay back the United States the money they borrowed under the TARP program. Yesterday, Goldman Sacks reported a $1.8 billion profit for the first quarter of 2009.

This financial crisis is far from over, with insurance companies annuity products tainted with investments in unregulated financial products, middle class housing prices in free fall and commercial real estate failures about to bring down another layer of banks. If the United States wants to establish financial stability again it needs to keep these banks regulated until such time as a long term regulatory solution is passed into law. New regulations need to be comprehensive and cover the entire financial system. The last two decades have seen one major U.S. financial scan del after another. Followed by new reforms that have had very little impact.

April 10, 2009

Economic Reform in Washington D.C. Looks To Be Less Than Inspiring

Small businesses and self employed people need massive amounts of credit to start new businesses and redirect their existing businesses. Even micro loans to freelancers is very beneficial to creating economic growth. Right now if a person is unemployed, over the age of 45 and has a craft, they may be more likely to be able to find a a loan to start a business than they are to be hired in a new job.

But, people still need more access to small business credit to get restarted. Instead the federal government is spending the limited amount of taxpayer money on propping up the so-called zombie, too big to fail, capitalist banks. Maybe we have the wrong business model and the time to start changing it is now.

If recent performance is any indication of future results, we can expect that new federal health care reform will do away with the ability of health insurance companies to turn people down for coverage in exchange to requiring all individuals in the U.S. to have health insurance and expand the subsidies that will enable some people to purchase health insurance.

Our three years of experience speaking to over 25,000 people and businesses in Massachusetts is that none of the steps currently being talked about will control health insurance premium costs that continue to rise at least 10% a year.

April 9, 2009

McKinsey Management Consultants Report Reveals Growing Health Care Cost Disparity By Income

How health care costs contribute to income disparity in US - The McKinsey Quarterly - health care costs income disparity US - Economic Studies - Country Reports

March 23, 2009

$100 Billion In More Wall Street Bailouts Announced for Buyers of Toxic Assets, A Major Disappointment

Rather than rid us of toxic banks and insurance companies, the Obama administration financial team announced that they continued to follow the policies of the Bush administration and announced a government subsidy of private investment by the elite capital market financial institutions that are designed to have the fig leaf of a functioning market system. We care about what works, not the theory of free market economics that really means monopoly market power in many industries. We hope that President Obama will remain flexible and pragmatic and change tactics if this plan does not work.

We are also still waiting for federal legal action to take place against the leadership of these companies, before citizens loose patience and begin mass action against these companies, whose failed management is being left in place, while the recession deepens into a depression, with more tent towns of homeless families sprouting up.

March 18, 2009

With the Distribution of $165 million to AIG Financial Brokers, Mostly Working In London, We Must Ask the Question, Who Is Running This Country?

This action and others like it, hidden by the Bush administration and accepted by the Obama administration, can not be tolerated for one day. Anyone who has run business organizations or worked for bonus compensation in management or as a front line employee knows that contracts are broken everyday by the people with the most leverage to make it happen. Hiding behind unjust laws is no excuse for inaction by the Obama administration or the Congress.

From our business we know AIG quite well and anyone who has worked with them should not be surprised by their actions.

February 26, 2009

AIG 60 Billion Short? A Zombie Insurance Company joins the major Zombie banks in a Potemkin Village of a financial system that leaves in power the incompetent managers and fatally flawed financial system that needs to be replaced.

There was a time not to long ago when organizations looked to AIG as the most stable of the health reinsures in the world. Now they are one of most unstable because they got into the business of insure ring credit default swaps on financial products. Just how bad is it over at AIG? The latest number is 60 billion in losses for the fourth quarter of 2008. This is dangerous territory for anyone who knows anything about the insurance business. Unless this company is broken up immediately and nationalized the fallout to health plans will be significant.