If Cigna hadn’t put profits before the health of those they insure, they wouldn’t have contributed to the death of an innocent or be facing a public relations nightmare.

Attorney Mark Geragos said he plans to ask the district attorney to press murder or manslaughter charges against Cigna HealthCare in the case. The insurer “maliciously killed her” because it did not want to bear the expense of her transplant and aftercare, Geragos said.

We need a health care system that makes health of patients primary, not the profit of corporations - before more insured patients die because their insurance company refused to pay claims.

Tip: C&L

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Should you be in a holiday mood and wish to send a present to Polizeros…

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Commercial real estate will be the next domino to fall. Portfolio explains why.

Lending standards fell, starkly. Or as I prefer to see it, they were thrown out of the 60th-floor window of that gleaming office tower in downtown Atlanta/Phoenix/New York/San Francisco/insert your city here. The gap between the cost of debt servicing and the cash actually being generated by the buildings narrowed. What’s more, it used to be that banks made loans for no more than 80 percent of the value of a property to ensure a healthy cushion of protection, but by the early part of 2007, loans were sometimes made for 120 percent of a property’s value. Who would be so crazy as to lend more than a property is worth? Anyone who believes in perpetual-motion machines—that is, that rents and underlying property values must always go up.

Or someone who was making large fees for doing so and who care if loan went bad. Because the real point was to package the loans into bonds so they could be sold, thus making more money.

Regulators did nothing to stop this until the bubble burst. For those who say that markets function best when unregulated, I say, this is what happens when they are.

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Drive By Truckers. The Dirty South

Lynyrd Skynyrd meets Steve Earle in a swamp. Or something like that!

From “Puttin’ People on the Moon”

Mary Alice got cancer just like everybody here
Seems everyone I know is gettin’ cancer every year
And we can’t afford no insurance, I been ten years unemployed
So she didn’t get no chemo so our lives was destroyed
And nothin’ ever changes, the cemetery gets more full
And over there in Huntsville, even NASA’s shut down too.

Drive By Truckers website

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