Water, water everywhere and not a drop to drink

Well here's a surprise. The ominpotent invisible hand of the free market flips the bird to approximately one third of the residents of West Viriginia. Freedom Industries tells its creditors to take a flying leap:

CHARLESTON, W.Va. -- Freedom Industries, the company that fouled thousands of West Virginians' water with a chemical leak last week, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy today.

The company's assets and liabilities are "unknown," according to the filing. Under the bankruptcy code, Chapter 11 permits a company to reorganize and continue operating. Chapter 11 also requires all creditors to stop all collection attempts.

Freedom owes $3.66 million to its top 20 unsecured creditors, according to bankruptcy documents.

I'm pretty sure that doesn't include the many plaintiffs currently filing lawsuits over the loss of potable water for a week and counting.

Meanwhile, this is how that paragon of corporate virtue has been dealing with delivering emergency water supplies:

CHARLESTON, W.Va. -- West Virginia American Water pulled its bulk water tankers out of service in Kanawha County Thursday evening, after complaints that the water being distributed to residents had the same odor as the chemical-tainted water from last week's Freedom Industries spill into the Elk River.

Water company spokeswoman Laura Jordan said the tankers had been filled near the plant after zero levels of the chemical "Crude MCHM" were recorded. "But to avoid any concerns," she said, "just to reassure our customers, we're filling up the tankers from another system."

Photo credit to Robert Johnson of Business Insider who tells us this is what he saw at his hotel.

The sink filled quickly and this was left behind 60 minutes later after it slowly drained.

Click over for more photos and ask yourself would you bathe in water the color of what is still standing in his bathtub? I'll be interested in seeing what they do about billing for water use after the spill.

[Big thanks to Michael J.W. Stickings of The Reaction for kindly linking in at Mike's Blog Roundup. (Twitter: @mjwstickings).]

If only they had passed Medicare for All

It's like everybody forgot what health insurance was like before Obamacare. Sam Baker reminds us don't blame Obamacare just because it's there. Take for instance, losing your doctor:

Insurers tried to narrow their provider networks in the '90s using HMOs, and consumers hated the plans so much that insurers ultimately backed away. That could happen again this time—the Affordable Care Act doesn't require narrow networks and it doesn't dictate how much insurers pay doctors.

"No one has ever heard of an HMO? Networks have been around forever," said Aaron Carroll, director of the Center for Health Policy and Professionalism Research at Indiana University. "The idea of networks as somehow new or government-created is strange.... I understand why people don't like it. They never have. But it's not the fault of the Affordable Care Act. It's the fault of trying to keep spending to a minimum."

I recall many stories before they passed the ACA about people losing their doctors because employers changed plans, raised rates and cut benefits. And speaking of employers and high deductibles:

But deductibles were already on the rise, pre-Obamacare. In the market for employer coverage, which Obamacare barely touches, deductibles have been growing steadily. In 2006, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, 10 percent of workers covered by an employer plan had an annual deductible of $1,000 or more. By 2010, the year the Affordable Care Act passed, it was up to 27 percent. By last year it had reached 38 percent.

In other words, Big Business is blaming Obamacare for cuts they were already planning to make to save money and raise profits.

Our legislators should have listened to the hippies who were screaming for single payer. They should have ignored Joe Lieberman's great concerns that derailed the Medicare buy-in deal. But they didn't. In the end, the only thing that would pass is this Rube Goldberg morass of new regulations that allowed the middlemen to maintain their status as useless skimmers. As Baker puts it:

There's not a big difference between "how Obamacare works" and "how health insurance works"—and that, health experts said, is what makes the law such a convenient target.

Atrios warned them about this from the first day of negotiations. No matter what happened, and it was never going to be great as long as insurance corporations weren't cut out as the arbiters of health care, Obamacare and Democrats were going to be blamed for everything wrong with the system. The system sill sucks and always will until we cut out the middlemen. [image via]

Don't blame Obamacare

I never expected to find myself in agreement with Juan Williams today but he's absolutely right. Quit yer bitching about Obamacare and blame the damn insurance corporations.

It baffles me that people are directing their anger at the ACA which rights these terrible wrongs. [...]

The Hartford Courant newspaper reports that the CEO of Aetna insurance made $36 million last year plus several millions more in stock options.

They also report that the CEO of Cigna cleared a cool $12.5 Million plus stock options.

The American health insurance industry is one of the most profitable in the history of the world. Before the ACA, they made money by finding any excuse, any loophole to deny coverage to the sickest and most vulnerable people in our society.

As Juan says, the damn insurers should be grateful they weren't cut out of the skimming business altogether by Medicare for All, which might have been a thing if professional concern troll Joe Lieberman hadn't killed it dead in utero on the Senate floor. They should be competing in the free market they're always railing about by offering an honest, affordable policy instead of pulling these desperate last minute scams on the consumer trying to squeeze the last drop of blood money out of the system before the public discovers Obamacare isn't to blame after all.