In the olden days if a Mafioso ratted on somebody he'd get thrown off a bridge or tossed off a rowboat wearing cement shoes. Nowadays nobody's ratting on nobody. And why's that? Because the new mafia has made it darn near impossible to rat anybody out, just because it's all so stinking complicated that hardly anybody knows what's really going on.

But the end game is still the same: kill any bugger that gets in your way or costs you money.

When somebody gets killed every half hour in this country you'd think it might just get noticed. Nah. First you'd have to know the links, how it all fits together. And with a body on the floor who's going to notice the dozen different things that caused it to happen in the first place? Nobody, that's who.

Here, I'll give you an example. Say Johnny Walnuts starts to notice his crew isn't taking in nearly as much as it did last year. So he ups his premiums, say. Things start to look better, but not as much as Joe, aka "Prior Auth" Lucchese, the Godfather to his cronies, expects to get from his pals. So he thinks, Maybe double the copays. Yeah, that's the ticket. Oh, and while we're at it we're going to put limits on cancer drugs. And biological. Heck, anything that costs a lot. People will assume they're still covered, but they won't be really. If they get the Big C, Joe says, then we're collecting the benefits without paying the dividends, see? Beautiful!

Everybody saw the beauty of it: big money flowing in, very little paying out. And with every little bit of small print added the complicated became even more complicated, which just meant fewer and fewer people would be able to connect the dots. The Barzini family at Aetna, the Tattaglias in Humana, the Corleones of BC/BS, and the smaller families that feed off the crumbs left them, they all began to multiply the separate plans within each family, until there was over ten thousand different "insurances" offered over the entire country. Each had the same complicated structures—which the families changed month to month without even notifying anyone! The plan worked perfectly, until some smart accountants started noticing all the money we'd been spending compared to other countries. They thought that maybe the country was getting ripped off. Of course they were right.

When it turns out that some poor schmuck's cancer isn't covered the guy can't afford the treatments. First, he goes bankrupt, then he dies. The girl waiting for the new liver never gets it approved. Sure the girl's mom takes "The Company" to trial but by then it's way too late. And the company's lawyers still get paid! Oh the plan is so perfect the old time Mafia must be weeping over their beers. They thought they had it good, knocking on the doors of a strip joint and speak easy, "asking" for insurance money just in case somebody might happen to want to burn down their joint. The real money, they learned, was in the real, actual insurance business. The new mafia is making mince meat out of the old, all the time acting like they're all hot shot businessmen. They even have their own political party, the Republicans, to try and complicate things even further, blaming government for the mess. Can you imagine! That'd be like the Gambinos blaming the FBI for all the mafia mess. The weird thing is that it's working. It's like somebody once said, killing is their business, and business is good.

Comments

Michael Guzzo said…
Everybody thought it was the Tattaglias who started this mess, but in reality, it was Barzini all along.

What we need is for Barack "The Don" Obama to take out the five families and consolidate business under just one family.

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