The "The Flim-Flam Conservative Plan" is a multi-tiered system in which "healthcare indeed follows the buck" If you have enough money, you will be assured of adequate coverage. All others are treated differently.

1. By withholding services for those in need.
2. By raising premiums, deductible, and decreasing services or eliminating them.
3. Private plans are more costly than fee for service.
4. By fraud due to overbilling or billing for services never delivered.
5. Insurance companies spend 15-30% on overhead as opposed to 3 % by Medicare.
6. There are over 200 insurance companies with even more plans. The more the merrier!
7. Companies "cherry pick" and go after younger, healthy people who use fewer services.
8. AETNA recently boasted in a New York Times article that its profits rose 28% by raising premiums and dropping 4.5 million members. They were "too costly" to maintain in the system and were unprofitable.
9. Profits from insurance companies are shared with the CEO’s, Doctors, and Stockholders. (Senator Kennedy quipped on television recently that insurance companies are good for Wall Street but not Main Street. How right he is!)
10. Increased consolidation due to insurance company acquisitions is giving even more control to healthcare system to monopolies, a dangerous trend.
11. Costs are up, "quality" is down. Duke University Hospital has 1,032 people in billing and claims and that is more than patients on any given day. There are 3.6 million paper pushers handling claims and paper work and that is more than people taking care of patients. This clutter and inefficiency has even spawned novel undergraduate and graduate degrees in billing systems.

                                                             We Need Single Payer