For asking why your insurance rates increase, you can be arrested
Posted on September 17th, 2009 by Jason Rosenbaum in Profits Before People
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Joe Szakos leads the Virginia Organizing Project, an almost fifteen year-old community organization that Health Care for America Now works with in Virginia to organize for health care reform. Szakos's organization employs dozens of people, and they get their health care through Anthem Blue Cross/Blue Shield.
This year, Szakos was informed that Anthem was going to increase the premiums on Virginia Organizing Project's health plan by 14.1%. Around the same time, the Virginia Organizing Project received an email from Anthem:
We strongly support reform that builds a strong, sustainable private-sector health care system - and strongly oppose creating a government-run health plan. We are urging our elected officials in Washington to take bipartisan action that will accomplish that. We are educating policymakers in Washington and working with our trade associations to encourage Congress to build on the current system and not disrupt the quality, affordable coverage on which our members depend….
As our elected officials debate health care, they need to hear directly from you.
Szakos immediately had some questions for Anthem. Chief among them, why is Anthem using its resources to lobby against health care reform with a public health insurance option while at the same time increasing rates by 14.1%?
Szakos, along with three other Virginia Organizing Project board members, went down to Anthem's offices in Richmond, VA to ask. He left in handcuffs. Watch the video:
Szakos, a customer, couldn't get an answer from Anthem. There was no justification for raising rates on one hand, and spending money lobbying against health care reform on the other. And instead of trying to offer Szakos an explanation, they had him arrested.
As Szakos said in the video, this is about greed and force. There is no good explanation for these rate increases, and there is no justification for Anthem to spend money it collects in premiums from customers suffering under its "health care" plans on lobbying against reform that would help these very same people. The only thing motivating Anthem - and all insurance companies - is greed. And they get and keep their money by force.
If the insurance companies win, you lose, and if you protest, you'll be arrested. That's health care in this country right now, but it cannot be our future. Reform must work for you, not the industry, and that means no more denying care for pre-existing conditions, coverage you can afford, and the choice of a public health insurance option to increase competition and keep these greedy corporations honest.
Anything less is a win for the industry and a loss for you.
Szakos's trial is scheduled for September 22nd. Szakos’s legal defense team has subpoenaed Anthem’s CEO C. Burke King and director of public relations Scott Golden to appear in court on Tuesday to explain themselves. Stay tuned for more…
All the company needed to do was send one person out to talk to him, give him a phone number and explain that at this particular location no one was trained to handle these issues. They went out of their way to put this guy in jail.
I am dumbfounded…………………..all I can say is WTF????
They don't even care about their image having someone taken out in handcuffs. Talk about the extreme arroghance of the rich & protected…………………..do you really think that this is what the founding fathers envisioned?
I live in SW Pa near Pittsburgh and with the G-20 next week, we will see protesting like never before.
I went to school with Joe at W&J and lost contact after graduation. I emailed him once I saw this video at his VOP website. Hope to hear from him. He is now as he was then; and, I am proud to have known him then and even more now. He has always been a man of conviction.
bob class of '76
On what charges was he arrested on? Talk about scare tactics.
Trespassing I believe.
we need an American Citizens Healthcare System !!!
a public option is an absolute must !!!
the 14 to 17% of gnp that americans now pay annually is far too
high and must be reduced.
the approx 160 health insurance companies and sadly the drug companies also have through their greed become the "death panel" and sowed the seed of their own destruction/business losses. then so called conservatives say the gov't can't do anything at a resonable cost…and now say competing with a public option would be unfair… you can not have it both ways !!! congress needs to get on with it now !!!