From Volume 38, Issue 27 of EIR Online, Published July 15, 2011

U.S. Economic/Financial News

HMO Murderers Are Now Buying Up the Doctors!

July 4 (EIRNS)—The major difference between Obama's T4 health genocide program, and that of its Hitler-Tony Blair model, is that the Obama system, to a large extent, turns the victims over to the "private sector," specifically, to the murderous, for-profit health maintenance organizations. The top five health insurers in the U.S. control the bulk of care provided in this way, starting with UnitedHealth Group (run by Blair sidekick Simon Stevens), followed by WellPoint, Aetna, Human, and CIGNA.

A July 3 article in the Washington Post, written by a competitor to these vultures, the Kaiser Family Foundation, exposes one of the next steps in the consolidation of the Obama Hitler health program. The article documents that UnitedHealth Care, and all the other companies but Aetna, are moving to buy up doctors' practices, in order to move the cost-cutting back up the line. Currently, doctors often fight with the insurance companies to get patients the care they need. Under this system, their boss will tell them not to offer that "unnecessary" care at all.

United has a special subsidiary, OptimumHealth, which is buying up doctors' groups, and fostering new partnerships of doctors, with the express aim of "modernizing" "the way medicine is practiced." What that means is cutting costs, and lives, al à Obama's Hitler Health plan.

Minnesota Government Shutdown Will Cost, Not Save, Money

July 4 (EIRNS)—The State of Minnesota will lose millions of dollars, and will face new costs, due to the state government shutdown that began on July 1, and continues, reports the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. Minnesota will lose millions in revenues, including from highway tolls, state park user fees, and lottery income. Among new expenses the state will face are unemployment benefits for 22,000 newly laid-off state employees, most of whom are entitled to 50% of their pay while not working; they will also continue to receive health insurance. Estimates are that it will cost the state $13 million a week just to keep all these workers idle. "We continue to believe a shutdown costs more than it saves," says an AFSCME spokesman. The state will also face significant costs due to disruption in highway construction, involving more than 100 road projects.

U.S. Employment Is Collapsing and Obama Is Channeling 'W' Bush

July 8 (EIRNS)—Asked by the Los Angeles Times to comment on the June U.S. "jobs" report, that only 18,000 new jobs were created last month, economist Heidi Schierholtz of the Economic Policy Institute said the employment news is so bad that she can't find any words to describe it.

Even through the fog of "adjustments," seasonal, virtual, and otherwise, applied by the Labor Department's Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) on behalf of a desperate White House, it is clear that employment is falling economy-wide, and that mass unemployment is shrinking the U.S. labor force faster and faster. What makes this the issue of the day, Lyndon LaRouche commented, is that every single economist outside of our organization was caught totally flat-footed by the news, since they were stupidly forecasting significant job creation for June—in the middle of a global depression!

The "headline" figure from the BLS's "Establishment Survey" for June, was a total "creation" of just 18,000 net new jobs, while the previous months of April and May were revised down well more than that, by -44,000. This apparent zero growth in employment was bad enough to cause freakouts among economists and at the Treasury and Fed; but this +18,000 figure is itself a mirage: It includes some 131,000 virtual jobs, imputed by the BLS's computers in a monthly "adjustment" procedure which has been shown for years to inflate job figures by at least 50-70,000 every month. This nonsense is supposed to capture hiring by new small businesses; a survey during June of more than 1,000 such businesses, taken by U.S. Bankcorp, showed that they are not hiring, period, and 80% of them have no plans to hire this year.

So, there was actually a net loss of jobs across the economy. Hourly and weekly average wages also fell, as did average weekly hours worked. The pace of elimination of government employees across the country accelerated; 39,000 were cut in June, including 14,000 Federal, 11,000 state, and 14,000 municipal jobs.

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