Why Were Arrested Yesterday

Click here to send a fax to your Members of Congress and let them know that you consider the insurance industry to be engaged in criminal behavior.

Dennis Short Joan Kosloff, Michael Ladson, Ray Torres and I were arrested yesterday at 12:30 pm for blocking the doors to CIGNA’s world headquarters in Philadelphia today.

The fourteen hours I was in jail were not much fun—although it was a day in the park compared to the suffering that insurance companies in America regularly deal out not only to those they refuse to insure and but those they do insure.

The crowded cell, noise, stench, stale air, and hard steel bench were not were not really conducive to thought. But I had time on my hands and spent some of it thinking about how to explain, especially to those of you who may have had some doubts about our action, why we turned to civil disobedience in the health care campaign yesterday.

There are two reasons.

The first is that health care is the moral issue of our day. Health care is a right and we are fighting to make that right effective for everyone in this country. The back and forth about the right wing lies about what we support have clouded the moral issue that is the basis of our struggle. So we needed to take dramatic action yesterday to make clear that this fundamental moral issue should be our focus.

The second is that the health insurance industry today is a rogue industry, a predator industry that damages the lives of people all over this country. There are a lot of industries that harm people unintentionally and indirectly. Some industries pollute; others give off a great deal of carbon dioxide. The health insurance industry is different and far worse. It intentionally and directly targets people who are ill or likely to be ill. Health insurers could not make obscene profits except by denying health care to those they insure, dropping health insurance of people who have gotten sick, and refusing to insure people who have a pre-existing condition at affordable costs.

No other industry in this country beside the tobacco industry makes money by doing thigns that  it knows will bring pain, suffering and death to our fellow Americans in order to make high profits.

Have we come so far in our veneration of income and wealth in this country, that we can’t say that this is wrong and must stop? Ed Hanway, the CEO of CIGNA, and the other executives of that company should be ashamed of how they make their money.

To win our fight for strong regulations on the health insurance industry and for a public health insurance plan that will provide as check on this powerful industry, we have to delgitimate it in the minds of the American people. We have to hold CIGNA and other health insurance companies up to up a higher standard than wealth. We have t0 make the moral case for limiting the power of these companies absolutely clear.  And we have to make it evident—and keep telling members of Congress and their constituents—that these predatory companies are the main opponents of reform.

So please, take a minute and Click here to send a fax to your Members of Congress and let them know that you consider the insurance industry to be engaged in criminal behavior.