Fight Back: Revoke Insurance Company Charters

by Stephen Fleischman

We have the mechanism—built into our system—to save our country.

Every corporation or limited liability company in the United States is chartered by a State.

A corporate charter is a document filed with a US state by the founders of a corporation detailing the major components of a company such as its objectives, its structure and its planned operations. If the charter is approved by the state government, the company becomes a legal corporation.

Health insurance companies are such legal corporations with state charters.

David Korten, author of “When Corporations Rule the World”, points out that “the basic design of the private-benefit corporation was created in 1600 when the British crown chartered the British East India Company as what is best described as a legalized criminal syndicate to colonize the resources and economies of distant lands…”

Today’s American corporations evolved from that.

The corporation is a separate legal entity having its own rights, privileges, and liabilities distinct from those of its members. The private-benefit corporation is just that—a corporation chartered for its own private benefit, but it has to provide some socially positive good. If the corporation, chartered by the state, fails to provide the function for which it is chartered, or misapplies the function, the charter can be revoked. The state giveth and the state can taketh away.

Over the years, the Supreme Court has bestowed additional blessings on corporations. In effect, it has made them almost human, granting them some of the same rights as US citizens, freedom of speech and freedom of the press, for example.

Corporations can express their opinions in public and in the media as you or I can. This gives them enormous power. They can buy up commercial television time and print media ads and faux news coverage because they have the power and the money.

As Sarah Stodola says in The Brooklyn Rail, “The Supreme Court has interpreted the constitution in a manner that has allowed corporations to ascend to unprecedented levels of power. The phenomenon even has a name, and that name is ‘corporate personhood.’ And corporate personhood, friends, is why corporations are able to buy elections.”

There is a myriad of different, and overlapping, health care organizations generating a blizzard of paperwork in an administrative wilderness creating enormous waste—thousands, if not millions of people pushing paper around—forms needed to be completed in order to get paid, to say nothing of patients fighting their way through a jungle of obstacles trying to get the health care they need.

In the current situation—in the battle for health care reform—the health insurance industry is exercising its clout. They are spending whopping amounts of money in the mainstream media propagandizing against the health care reform plans being worked on in Congress.

The insurance companies are terrorized by the possibility of a “public option” being included in the bill that comes out of the legislature. Single payer, universal health care is, of course, off the table. Any kind of government plan similar to Medicare, they fear, would jeopardize their billions in health care profits.

Their fear is so great, they are losing their cool. In addition to the propaganda barrage, they are calling out the goon squads to disrupt civil discussion of the various health care reform plans being considered.

Members of Congress and the Senate, who have returned to their constituencies during the August break, and are holding town hall public meetings with their voters to discuss the health care plans are getting a taste of some poisonous medicine.

In addition to angry shouting and disruption, some legislators favoring liberal features in the plan are getting death threats, one even hung is effigy. One goon came to a town meeting with his gun showing.

The insurance companies’ misinformation campaign raises the bug-a-boo of “socialized medicine”. You’d think it was some kind of torture instead of the government’s granting a benefit to the people, very much like Social Security and Medicare.

Some of the behavior the insurance companies are exhibiting, moreover encouraging, is in obvious violation of their charters.

So why isn’t something done about it?

Revoke their charters!

Health insurance companies are useless, anyway. They make a profit, and an enormous one, on your health and mine.

End the merry-go-round on health care by political candidates. Get rid of the blood-sucking health insurance industry, once and for all.

There are legitimate grounds on which to revoke their charters!

Make health care for our citizens a right and not a privilege. Small businesses that have the burden of supplying health coverage for their employees will thank us for it. Let’s join the world of civilized, industrial nations that provide single payer, universal health insurance for their people. Everybody in. Nobody out.

With the misinformation dispelled, any candidate running for office will get elected on that platform.