Jerry Flanagan Afford Quotations

Requiring something people cannot afford is not a solution to solving the health care crisis.

Recent mergers have given the industry a strangle hold over the health insurance market. With fewer pressures for efficiency and no government oversight of rates, insurers have been given free rein to spend more of our health care dollars on overhead, profit, and administration. The last decade of HMO mergers has taught us that when fewer HMOs dominate the health care market, quality goes down, premiums go up, and patients get short changed. Already, 45 million Americans are uninsured because they cannot afford to pay the insurers' ransom.

At a time when 6.5 million Californians cannot afford their health care and millions more are underinsured, it is obscene to allow executives to feed at the trough of huge cash and stock payouts.