Yesterday I wrote some about bigotry, and facing my own prejudices. How was it I could so swiftly judge the poor I had Thanksgiving dinner with at the church?

Today I am going to write a bit about a class of people who deserve all the hatred and intolerance we can heap on them.

I am talking about medical insurance underwriters.

I marveled today as I was walking that medical underwriters are slick and smart professionals, whose whole job it is to exclude from medical coverage those individuals determined to be at high risk of needing future medical care. The idea is, if you're a health insurance carrier, you want to keep your business profitable and your shareholders happy. So you insure healthy people who aren't going to cost your concern money.

Medical underwriters, more often than not, have medical training. Let me emphasize, these people command high salaries, solely to deprive people of what other industrialized nations recognize as a basic human right.

But medical underwriters' salaries help ratchet up the administrative costs of American healthcare. Prohibitive administrative expense is a big factor in what makes the delivery of medical services in the United States so ghastly expensive and inefficient, relative to that in other industrialized countries.

Medical underwriters are useless parasites. Please join with me in working to get them all fired.

If you're in California, I urge you to support SB 840. If you're in another state, please support your local single-payer lobby.
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