Most likely you’ve all seen a Bond movie (or three), but for those who are new to the concept, let me outline Bond Supervillain Syndrome:

Dashing, womanizing, and ultimately cold-blooded killer James Bond has been captured by a villain while on assignment by Her Majesty’s Secret Service. The stakes are very high; often the villain has by this point assembled a doomsday device or at least stolen a nuclear weapon; sometimes they have brought the United States and the Soviet Union to the brink of nuclear war.

At this point, a rational human being in the villain’s position would take a remarkably simple course of action: kill Mr. Bond. Quickly, efficiently. Get it over with and move on to World Domination, or at least a comfortable retirement on some warm tropical isle. Instead these old-school villains invariably set up some elaborate death trap or other and leave Mr. Bond to escape, now knowing the full details of their scheme and positioned correctly to defeat it. Hilarity ensues.

Why bring this up? Well, after a long year of secret backroom deals, ridiculously heavy lobbying, and writing the damn bill themselves, the Health Insurance Industry had victory in sight thanks to the legislative abortion known as ‘Health Care Reform’ in the Senate. All they had to do was shoot Mr. Bond in the back of the head, dump his body somewhere, and keep quiet for a couple of months.

Instead, what did they do?

Anthem Blue Cross is telling many of its approximately 800,000 customers who buy individual coverage — people not covered by group rates — that its prices will go up March 1 and may be adjusted “more frequently” than its typical yearly increases.

The insurer declined to say how high it is increasing rates. But brokers who sell these policies say they are fielding numerous calls from customers incensed over premium increases of 30% to 39%, saying they come on the heels of similar jumps last year.

That’s right; instead of keeping their heads down and getting the Senate bill passed, ensuring them government mandated profits in the billions and forcing millions of Americans into their clutches for fear of the IRS… they decided to set up a winch over the piranha tank.

Tom Simmons, the president of a consulting and design firm with four employees in Oakland, said he had recently read about the Anthem rate hikes when he received a letter from his insurance company, Blue Shield of California, telling him that his monthly family health premium would increase from $908 per month to $1,596 per month, an increase of almost 76 percent.

…

The recent news that WellPoint’s Anthem Blue Cross health insurance company in California wanted to increase premiums for individual policyholders as much as 39 percent is further evidence the current health system is not sustainable. And a survey by the Center for American Progress Action Fund found that California isn’t the only state where WellPoint is hiking individual premium rates by double-digit percentages. In fact, double-digit hikes have been implemented or are pending in at least 11 other states among the 14 where WellPoint’s Blue Cross Blue Shield companies are active: California, Colorado, Connecticut, Georgia, Indiana, Maine, Nevada, New Hampshire, New York, Virginia, and Wisconsin.

This sort of melodramatic price-gouging is hardly new, as a report yesterday indicated. Insurance industry greed has driven the unsustainable growth in health insurance costs for many years now. However, the difference between villainy and cartoonish supervillainy comes when you take that extra step to rub salt in the wounds of someone you’ve already beaten.

And that’s what I think boosters of the Exchange model (sans public option) fail to understand. Supporters of the Senate plan believe that it will curb the rise in costs, that having information available to the end consumer, along with some limited protection from the most egregious consumer abuses, will be sufficient to bring the insurance companies under control.

The flaw in this thinking is obvious, given the insurance industry’s diagnosis of BSS: they can’t be controlled by anyone. They’re completely unhinged. No matter how many mechanisms you put in place to encourage them to put away their death traps, power down the laser beams and behave in a slightly more modest, though no less ruthless manner, they will return to abusing the consumer, again and again. They can’t stop; it’s a compulsion. Eventually they’ll destroy themselves.

The only question is whether we’ll be trapped with them in the secret volcano base when the time comes.

I’ll start out by saying that I never supported the House healthcare bill and I still don’t. It doesn’t do nearly enough to contain the soaring costs of health insurance in this country, it doesn’t come remotely close to achieving universal coverage, and it certainly doesn’t bring the insurance companies into line with tough and meaningful standards.

That having been said, a public alternative to our woefully inadequate private health insurance system, even a pathetic, crippled version like the one passed by the House, is better than compelling millions of Americans to buy the defective and dangerous products of the private health system.

In fact, for reasons Glenn Greenwald outlined months ago, passing the Senate’s version of healthcare moves us dangerously closer to a true merger of corporate and governmental power:

Even if one grants the arguments made by proponents of the health care bill about increased coverage, what the bill does is reinforces and bolsters a radically corrupt and flawed insurance model and an even more corrupt and destructive model of “governing.” It is a major step forward for the corporatist model, even a new innovation in propping it up.

I absolutely don’t grant those arguments, but as he said, it isn’t necessary to disagree about the expansion of coverage to oppose this bill. It’s merely necessary to oppose the government becoming an arm of the largest and most powerful corporations in the health sector. If you want your government to be of, by, and for Wellpoint, then by all means: support the Senate bill, support a bill without a public option. Construct your health insurance gulag (aka the Exchange) and cheer for your favorite company as they find ever newer and more exciting ways to deny claims.

Because, you know, that’s what they do. Insurance companies deny you health care to make money. That’s their model. They’re parasites, skimming dollars off the top that should go to necessary administrative costs or care. Arguments that they have a profit margin of ‘only’ 3% ignore both the realities of corporate accounting tricks and the moral imperative that, even if that 3% figure was accurate, it’s still WRONG to make money off of insurance premiums while denying and delaying the care that your customers need.

To make the argument that only skimming a little bit off the top is ok is akin to saying that because you only pushed Grandma down the stairs – you didn’t beat her prone body at the bottom of the steps with a tire iron – you’re a good person and exercise considerable restraint.

So here’s my pledge, the one mentioned in the title. If the Democratic party’s answer to our national health crisis is to send the IRS out as glorified bill collectors for Aetna and their friends, then they can forget about my vote.

I pledge, if the Senate version of HCR passes, that is to say, a health care bill that mandates that private individuals purchase a product they don’t want and can’t afford from private firms, then I won’t vote for any Democrat, in any election this year.

No matter what. I’m taking it out on ALL of them. I don’t care if you’re running for the Senate or for City Council, for the House of Representatives or for county dog catcher – no means no. Not one of you gets a vote from me.

Don’t misunderstand – I’m a registered voter (Wisconsin 2nd District). I absolutely intend to go to the polls. I’ll vote in every single contest.

But I will not vote for you.

And yes, I’ll even vote Republican if it comes to that.

It’s time to stop letting the Democratic party take our votes for granted. Returning again to the esteemed Mr. Greenwald:

Some of it has to do with broader questions of political power: if progressives always announce that they are willing to accept whatever miniscule benefits are tossed at them (on the ground that it’s better than nothing) and unfailingly support Democratic initiatives (on the ground that the GOP is worse), then they will (and should) always be ignored when it comes time to negotiate; nobody takes seriously the demands of those who announce they’ll go along with whatever the final outcome is.

I’m not bluffing, Democratic Party. I doubt very much if I’m alone, either.

So, apparently the Senate Combined Health bill is apocalyptically bad. I haven’t had much time to read it myself yet, but the early reviews are awful.

Let’s see, what’s wrong with it?

Well, to start with, it restores 50 million a year for abstinence only education. Which doesn’t work, of course. But who ever let a little thing like evidence get in the way of law? (At least, when it involves a handout to a religious group.)

Granted, 50 mil a year is peanuts. I’d gladly put a provision in the bill to give 50 billion to the Catholic Church if they’d shut their gob and keep out of US politics from now on.

It doesn’t stop insurance companies from selling insurance the way they do now, outside the exchange (except they can’t practice rescission or use pre-existing conditions). Which means that they don’t *have* to take anyone new. They can refuse to participate in the Exchange and turn down the subsidies, if they feel like it, and just price anyone they don’t want out of the individual market. Which means that the public option gets stuck in the Exchange taking ALL the sick people the Insurers don’t want.

That Public Option is an opt-out too. Which means that the idiot red states won’t get it. Now, I’m actually in favor of handing a gun to these redneck mouthbreathers and letting them blow their brains out, but it will cost us money in the long run. Well worth it, but still, costly.

The ‘Free Rider’ provision is in here, which means poor people won’t be able to get hired for a job. See, it works like this: if you, as a business, have an employee poor enough to get subsidies in the Exchange, you get fined. Thus, you have a strong financial incentive not to hire poor people. You’d much rather hire the teenage son or daughter of a local rich family, who has health insurance and doesn’t need Exchange credits, than the poor single mom who needs that paycheck to keep a roof over her head. Isn’t that swell?

It also guts all state regulations on insurance by letting insurers sell ‘national plans’ across state lines. This is a huge wet kiss to Cigna and United Health. Now, if your pesky state has rules they don’t want to follow, they don’t have to; they just move their PO box/headquarters to some uncivilized state full of knuckle-dragging savages (like Alabama) and presto, your laws no longer apply to them!

The credit card companies got the same deal a few years back. Boy, it’s pleasant dealing with them now that they’re de-regulated, huh? What’s that? There’s a desperate scramble to regulate them again? Gee, couldn’t see THAT ONE COMING.

It also screws over undocumented immigrants, who can’t buy insurance on the exchange, even without subsidies, with their own cash. Instead, they go to the emergency room, costing us 10 times the amount, or die. Or both! Great idea.

I talked in my last big post about Actuarial Value, the percentage of your expected, average health care costs that an insurance plan covers. Members of Congress get between 84-87%, meaning, on average, for every dollar of health care they’re billed for each year, they pay 13-16 cents.

In this Senate bill, the minimum value is 60%. You’d pay 40 cents, not their 13.

But fuck, you’re just a poor working class schlub. You deserve to be penalized for being poor; it’s obviously the judgment of God for your sins. We’re such a Calvinist country.

Finally, the ball doesn’t get rolling on the Exchange until 2014. FOUR MORE YEARS LIKE THIS.

Haha, oh God, what an unholy mess, and it’s all our fault.

This bill is so bad that the good folks at FDL are calling for it to die, and for the Senate, our own personal House of Lords, filibuster and elitism and all, to die right along with it.

Me, I see this as justice. This is what we wanted, as Americans. A system where no one has to pay attention, or think, or deal with empirical reality, where they can drown themselves in bible thumping and American Idol, where individual avarice and selfish greed has been elevated to holy ritual, and people with money are allowed to do whatever they want, because of the delusional belief that everybody will some day be rich. This, my friends, is American Democracy at its finest.

And H.L. Mencken said it best:

“Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.”