The Banksters have Discovered Insurance

Which explains all the dirty deals the Rahmmer is bent on cooking up with the blue dogs and the rethuglicans for the One.

They can't make a housing bubble so easily anymore.

...The bankers plan to buy “life settlements,” life insurance policies that ill and elderly people sell for cash — $400,000 for a $1 million policy, say, depending on the life expectancy of the insured person. Then they plan to “securitize” these policies, in Wall Street jargon, by packaging hundreds or thousands together into bonds. They will then resell those bonds to investors, like big pension funds, who will receive the payouts when people with the insurance die.

The earlier the policyholder dies, the bigger the return — though if people live longer than expected, investors could get poor returns or even lose money...

Now you wonder where all the money for all the airtime against health care for everyone is coming from?

And what could go wrong?

...policyholders often let their life insurance lapse before they die, for a variety of reasons — their children grow up and no longer need the financial protection, or the premiums become too expensive. When that happens, the insurer does not have to make a payout.

But if a policy is purchased and packaged into a security, investors will keep paying the premiums that might have been abandoned; as a result, more policies will stay in force, ensuring more payouts over time and less money for the insurance companies.

“When they set their premiums they were basing them on assumptions that were wrong,” said Neil A. Doherty, a professor at Wharton who has studied life settlements.

Indeed, Mr. Doherty says that in reaction to widespread securitization, insurers most likely would have to raise the premiums on new life policies...

Making it more likely of course, the new policyholders would abandon the policies or simply never buy them in the first place.

Now, which vampire cephalopod is at the bottom of this drain? Chances are, you guessed it:

...Goldman Sachs has developed a tradable index of life settlements, enabling investors to bet on whether people will live longer than expected or die sooner than planned. The index is similar to tradable stock market indices that allow investors to bet on the overall direction of the market without buying stocks...

Of course, there are other risks for the banksters and their rubes investors:

...In addition to fraud, there is another potential risk for investors: that some people could live far longer than expected.

It is not just a hypothetical risk. That is what happened in the 1980s, when new treatments prolonged the life of AIDS patients. Investors who bought their policies on the expectation that the most victims would die within two years ended up losing money.

It happened again last fall when companies that calculate life expectancy determined that people were living longer...

Increase the average lifespan of the undeserving masses lucky duckies by giving them medicare for all or even a public insurance option based on a progressive tax? Socialism! The pirates Barons of Wall Street are doing their patriotic duty ensuring no public plan ever passes Barry O.'s desk.

If it ever arrives there- which the DINOcrats are doing their best to avoid, But Mark Karlin has it wrong:

... the White House reluctantly released a partial log of who has visited with Obama's staff on so-called "healthcare reform" and it reads like a who's who of Big Pharma and health insurance lobbyists.

Let's stop the pretense of Obama making some bold move here.

Remember Medicare Part "D"? That was when Bush stuffed money in the pockets of Big Pharma by getting more prescription coverage for seniors, but only because the government was prohibited from negotiating or setting prices for the medications. In short, Big Pharma dictated the bill and has made billions of dollars and contributed to the Medicare shortfall at an an exorbitant rate. Medicare Part "D" helped seniors, but its real purpose was to loot the public treasury in order to fatten the profits of Big Pharma.

Now in that bill was a so-called "trigger" that if Big Pharma charged "too much" then a public option would trigger in on pharmaceuticals. But Big Pharma wrote the target for the trigger so high in the bill, which the Republicans championed, that the trigger has never been reached.

So a few weeks back Rahm "I don't give a shit about anything but winning -- don't f**king talk to me about principle and doing the right thing" Emanuel suggested to the Wall Street Journal that the public option for "Healthcare Reform" was no big deal anyway and the WH would be satisfied with a "trigger" for "healthcare reform," meaning that the for-profit insurance companies would police themselves. The WH had already negotiated a "self-policing" deal with Big Pharma, while keeping true healthcare reform advocates -- including public opiton and single payer advocates -- at bay, not even including them in negotiations.

Now, a New York Times article on Friday indicated that Emanuel was negotiating with Olympia Snowe on a "trigger" instead of a public option. This is Bush style "reform," not the change Obama promised. It's a sad joke that will allow Emanuel to end up with an outhouse and call it a victory, because that's all he is concerned with; i.e., to say he won, but what he won doesn't matter a whole lot to him...

That's not true. All the money he and his boss plan to make off this deal matter very much. You see, it's all a matter of priorities.