On Saturday I received a nice card in the mail from Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina.
The card was titled:
Send a message to North Carolina Senator Kay Hagan. Tell her we can reform health care without government-run insurance.
Inside was a nice postage-paid card to send to the Honorable Senator:
On the back it had a message telling Sen. Hagan to not support a public option.
Ok, I didn’t start this blog as a political site. But I look at it this way. I pay over $4,800 per year out of pocket for insurance coverage for my family with BCBS of NC. And they are using it for?
- Supporting a mailer like this that has a political message I don’t agree with
- $3M per YEAR salary of the BCBS CEO, Bob Greczyn
- $186 million in profits to BCBS shareholders
Ah, so, I get it. A public health option might reduce those fat paychecks.
Well, anyway, I figured that since I had no choice about whether to pay for this flyer, I should modify it a bit to send a message I agree with.
I used a nice old-fashioned tool called the pen:
Bottom line is that the very fact that I am forced to pay (through my premiums) to send political messages like this is evidence enough that there NEEDS to be a government-run option competing with these people.
Note that there is NO competition right now in my health insurance. I have NO other option but BCBS NC. I cannot decline it, I cannot choose another company that doesn’t waste my money on things like this. It is the only option. That’s why we need an alternative – the public option.
Funny thing is, I just did a Google search and I’m not the only one who had this reaction and modified my card. Seems that there’s no truly novel idea (at least not for good ideas like this one).
