Insurance Companies Caught Price Gouging While Banking On Subsidies

Health insurance companies are gouging consumers while taking millions of dollars from the federal government each year. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

Health insurance companies are gouging consumers while taking millions of dollars from the federal government every year. All right. This was supposed to be a program, ACA, right? The purpose of the ACA was to make health insurance more affordable. So the government starts pouring money. Here, take, take, take billions of dollars. Take billions of dollars. And oh, by the way, in addition to the billions of dollars, we're gonna give you some subsidies too. It wasn't just the billions of dollars they put in. They, they said, we're also going to give you subsidies. What did the corporate, what did the corporate freaks do with that?

They raised the prices on everybody else buying health insurance. And we're talking about $800 million that is about to be given to these insurance companies. That's not even including the billions they've already gotten.

Oh, they've already, they already have billions.

So there's a plan right now saying, we're gonna give you another $800 million.

Mm-hmm.

In addition to your subsidies, in addition to your tax breaks, in addition to all the special loopholes. All you gotta do is keep providing health insurance for low income Americans.

Truthfully, it was a good idea. It was a great idea until corporate sociopaths got involved with it. What's your prediction when we give them 800, 800 more million dollars? What are they gonna do with it?

They're, they're gonna continue to raise prices on us because they can. There's no controls in any of this.

Yeah, yeah.

And, and, and look, these companies, we could be spending $800 million or $80 billion on providing health insurance for everybody in this country. But instead we're taking that money and we're just giving it to private insurance that continues to screw us over.

Mm-hmm.

We keep being told Medicare for All is too expensive. No, this is too expensive to continue.

Doesn't the, doesn't somebody sit 'em down in a room and say, here's the deal. We have the right to regulate you and we will regulate you. Right now as high as 40%, 40% of all the profit these people are making is coming from the US government, taxpayers. And all we asked in return was, you make this available for people who can't afford health insurance. But again, you get the sociopath corporate involved and there are no rules. And so somebody has to say, yeah, there are. They have to walk into a room and say, here are the new rules. I'm the new sheriff and here's the new regulations.

But people have to understand too, okay, you get your paycheck, you see that your health insurance comes out of it. You're also paying your tax for Medicare.

Right.

So you're paying for other people's insurance there. And then as you said, 40% of the insurance company's profit is coming from tax dollars. So you're paying for three different kinds of health insurance.

Right, right.

Why can't we just put it towards universal healthcare? Free up the system, get these corporate price gougers outta here for good and, and be happy like the rest of the world.

Was I wrong that Biden promised to create a public health insurance option?

He was wishy-washy on it. It was back and forth.

Did he ever make the promise?

I, I don't know if he ever actually said I am or if he was against it. I know we had, you know, Bernie and Warren.

Yeah. Oh, Bernie was very strong on it.

That, that were all for it.

And so was Warren. Warren said, yeah, this is what we need to do. All right, well.

And we're left with this mess.