Know Your Scumbag, Part 5B

We need to make an unscheduled stop in the March of Scumbags as United Health Care, CEO William W. McGuire's (left) corporate crib features prominently in an odious story that was presented Wednesday nght on NPR's "The Story".

It seems that a young couple, Greg and Heather Mroz, (see below) were expecting twins. Even though Greg had lost his construction job they were still paying $1200 a month from savings in order to maintain their coverage.

There were complications in the pregnancy and the twins arrived prematurely. It was only then that the Mroz's discovered that United Health was claiming they violated the terms of their policy because the Mroz's had more than one baby.

Yes, they had an extra baby and their insurance company treated them like they secretly had asthma, or acne.

Only in America.

Now the Mroz's are $500,000 in the red and the insurance company won't talk to them. In fact, they hang up on the couple the moment it knows it's them. United Health is also keeping the $6000 in insurance payments over the previous five months with no explanation.

The Mroz's are now facing bankruptcy, are virtually penniless and are now living at home with his parents. They've acquired a lawyer, obviously on contingency, and are planning to fight this.

The story is so much worse than my simple recollection. I encourage you to spend a few minutes listening to the Mroz's tell the story themselves here.

This wouldn't happen with a single-payer plan. It's time to get in step with the rest of the civilized world.

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This is Drew Olanoff. He's not a scumbag. In fact, after having been diagnosed with Hodgkins Lymphoma his reaction was to start a cancer charity called BlameDrewsCancer. It reportedly did very well.

He also owns the @drew account name at Twitter. Four-letter account names are very rare so Drew decided to auction his account to the highest bidder, all to benefit charity.

Comedian Drew Carey wants the account and has said he'll pay one dollar for @drew for every person who becomes a follower of his current Twitter account @drewfromtv... up to one million dollars. Currently he's at 67,000 followers and growing.

So if you have a Twitter account that's not doing anything, how about helping the Drews?

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One last thing... I recently bought some new sneakers off the net. The box that arrived was roughly twice the size of the shoe-box within. Taking up the rest of the space in the box, providing all the padding, was this:


Without knowing it this sloppy eBay merchant provided the perfect visual metaphor for health insurance in this country... protection in theory, not practice.

=Lefty=