Health insurance greedheads have it their way

Given that there’s no good reason for these companies to even exist…

The seven largest publicly traded U.S. health insurance companies made a collective $71.3 billion in profits last year, and their CEOs took home a total of $146.1 million in compensation, according to an analysis released Wednesday by an ex-industry executive.

Wendell Potter, a former vice president for corporate communications at Cigna who now leads the nonprofit Center for Health and Democracy, compiled the data ahead of his recent testimony before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions.

As Potter detailed for his newsletter, Health Care un-covered, the companies—UnitedHealth, CVS/Aetna, Cigna, Elevance, Humana, Centene, and Molina—boosted their profits by more than half a billion dollars from 2023 to 2024. - Common Dreams

Of course Big Tech wants to exploit social-emotional learning

And that's exactly what it's doing.

The connections between the Along platform and corporate technology giant Facebook are a good example of how these companies can operate in schools while maintaining their right to use personal information of children for their own business purposes.

Given concerns that arose in a congressional hearing in December 2021 about Meta’s Instagram Kids application, as reported by NPR, there is reason to believe these companies will continue to skirt key questions about how they play fast and loose with children’s data and substitute a “trust us” doctrine for meaningful protections.

As schools ramp up these SEL digital tools, parents and students are increasingly concerned about how school-related data can be exploited. According to a recent survey by the Center for Democracy and Technology, 69 percent of parents are concerned about their children’s privacy and security protection, and large majorities of students want more knowledge and control of how their data is used.

Schools are commonly understood to be places where children can make mistakes and express their emotions without their actions and expressions being used for profit, and school leaders are customarily charged with the responsibility to protect children from any kind of exploitation. Digital SEL products, including Along, may be changing those expectations. - Nation of Change

How loathsome can the greedheads get?

Exceedingly loathsome indeed. And it needs to be made right.

“The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed deep inequalities and massive failures in our economic system, leaving tens of millions of people in the United States without jobs, devastating public services, and bankrupting countless small businesses,” Irit Tamir, director of the private sector department at Oxfam America, said. “Yet at the same time, thanks to a combination of government assistance and pure luck, a handful of corporations are raking it in and making already rich shareholders even richer.”

“...Profit is not a four-letter word, but when such dramatic and excessive profits are made during a time of global crisis and distributed to the wealthiest, the situation is not just fundamentally unjust, it is also economically inefficient,” Niko Lusiani, senior advisor on corporate advocacy at Oxfam America, and lead author of the analysis, said. “Corporations like Microsoft, Johnson & Johnson, Facebook, Pfizer, and Visa, flush with billions in pandemic profits and disproportionately benefiting from taxpayer-funded economic relief, now have the opportunity to gobble up smaller companies and deepen their market power at the expense of true competition. Taxing these windfall profits is a fair, time-tested way to rebuild better.” - Nation of Change