The once in a century mass casualty event of the COVID 19 pandemic has forced humans around the world to alter how we bury our dead, but it apparently hasn’t altered the way vested interests move self-serving legislation under Trenton’s golden dome.

As my colleague Max Pizarro reported yesterday, there was a case of bi-partisan whiplash as the chair of the Assembly Financial Institutions and Insurance Committee John McKeon (D-27) rushed through amendments to the controversial Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield restructuring bill.

The chair was humming along describing the amendments to the panel, when he was interrupted by Assemblyman Joe Danielson (D-17) who asked a $7 billion question, had the chair distributed a copy of the amendments?

That’s when the world learned that McKeon would have the amendments to this consequential legislation in the hands of his colleagues by today, permitting his colleagues 48 hours to review them before a vote on the bill on Monday.

When pressed about the warp speed trajectory of the bill, the chair countered “we have been working on this for a year and a half.”

That means this (partiuclar) bid at restructuring New Jersey’s largest healthcare insurance provider predates the COVID catastrophic event that’s on its way to taking 20,000 New Jersey residents’ lives by the end of the year. At the current die-off rate New Jersey, which is 2.77 percent of the nation’s population, accounts for 6.67 percent of the nation’s COVID deaths.

Early on in the pandemic, Gov. Phil Murphy was up front about the disproportionate impact of the pandemic on poor communities of color. He vowed that our state would alter its course to address this graphic manifestation of the virulent racism that gave rise to the massive protests after the police murder of George Floyd.

But what does that really mean in terms of changing facts on the ground going forward?

There’s been some concrete work done by our Governor in this regard on the labor front where we know people of color make up a disproportionate percentage of essential workers ravaged by COVID. With Murphy’s Nov. 5 executive order our state has in place the strongest workplace safety measures in the country for our essential workforce.

And thanks to both the Governor and our mostly labor friendly legislature, our first responders and healthcare workers on the front lines of the pandemic have the security of knowing that they have been granted a COVID presumption when it comes to any potential Workers Compensation claims if, as so many already have, experience long term health complications.

A pandemic is like a volcano eruption, it snags us in death just exactly the way we are living at the time it hits. But unlike the deadly eruption in ancient Pompeii, which killed as many as 16,000 people, our COVID eruption is still a mass casualty event very much still in progress with the final death toll and tally of the permanently disabled many months away.

The national data from the CDC indicates that Black and Latino residents are three times more likely to die from COVID than white people. We know that this cohort of our fellow Americans are more likely uninsured and required to have to work out in the world in the path of a raging pandemic as part of a winner take all economy that demands their prolonged exposure.

Thanks to the report by Brittany Holon-Trundy with New Jersey Policy Perspectives  entitled “Unprecedented and Unequal; Racial Inequities in the COVID-19 Pandemic”, we know in  places like Salem County, where Latinos make up nine percent of the population, they make up 40 percent of the COVID cases.

Specifically, Black residents in Atlantic, Burlington, Camden, Essex, Gloucester, Mercer, Somerset and Union counties “have been particularly over-represented” in the ranks of the COVID cohort.  Statewide, according to the Household Pulse Survey from the U.S. Census Black and Latino households “were approximately three times more likely than White households to report not having enough to eat in the last seven days,” reports NJPP.

The Horizon’s massive TV and social media blitz puts a happy face on the ghastly state of affairs, assuring us that with just an ever so subtle change in the small print of their regulations we will unleash a wave of innovation that will ensure their subscribers have unfettered access to the wonders of 21^st century telemedicine.

How nice for them.

As Maura Collingsgru, NJ Citizen Actions Healthcare Program Director pointed out, the greatest public health challenge New Jersey faces is that “600,000 people don’t have any coverage and don’t seek care. They don’t need a Fitbit they need access to a doctor and healthcare coverage.”

It would be great to know just how much Horizon and its allies are spending on its full court press to get its way to create this utopian “non-profit mutual holding company” that they insist will cure all that ails their customer base and lead to a healthier New Jersey.

We must put these local in-state developments for Horizon in a national and historical context.  Horizon was part of a national philanthropic movement during the Great Depression to provide all Americans with health care. Blue Cross Blue Shield has now devolved into a trade association, a franchise scam that pays many millions of dollars out to key players while offering $39,000 a year jobs for the intake folks at the bottom of the pyramid.

Like the robber barons of the energy and railroad trusts of a bygone era, there’s been a flood of mergers and acquisitions with some states’ Blue Cross Blue Shield entities buying out others.

Throughout this wheeling and dealing the one constant was ever larger payouts for the captains of this one industry, which more than any other, determines who amongst us lives or dies. This last big caper was in 2013 when Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan became a “non-profit mutual company.” Why with a 70 percent market share built up as a philanthropy, they had the home field advantage and their CEO cashed in.

Daniel Loepp went from $1 million compensation in 2006 to $19.2 million total in compensation package in 2018 which the Detroit Free Press noted was just a few million shy of what the CEO for General Models got the year before.

In Horizon’s pitch for the reset it promises the changes it requires will guarantee the “same state oversight” the multi-billion-dollar behemoth has always had. That’s a problem considering the company’s track record for paying its top talent millions of dollars a year to run a supposed non-profit in a state that has hundreds of thousands of uninsured human beings.

We are told by Horizon’s boosters it will “remain a not-for-profit, charitable and benevolent company” and that the critics of the deal are just making up facts because its status is enshrined in the marble of state law. Rest assured, you ill-informed peasants, “New Jersey law prohibits private inurement” for Horizon and our “Attorney General has the power and duty to enforce that law.”

And so, we can relax because the “public’s interest in the value of Horizon is protected by a set of laws that are not being modified in any way by this legislation.”

So, what would we call the $8.7 million compensation in 2010 for Horizon’s former Chairman and CEO William J. Marino or the $4.5 million that NJBiz reported Robert Marino made in 2016, which included his $950,000 salary plus his $3 million bonus?

“Updating our laws to allow Horizon to change its form to a not-for-profit mutual company will allow the Company to continue the needs of customers today and into the future,” reads Horizon’s promotional material. But what if the problem with Horizon is that it is a business in the first place? Could it be the very model we rely on of high-priced gatekeepers, premiums, strategic business alliances and deductibles all work to ration health care while enriching a small circle of CEOs, consultants and lobbyists? Could it be that’s what gives the whirl to the revolving door through which news media and government types fly through to grab that brass ring?

It would seem that before we restructure our state’s largest health care insurance provider as it wants our legislature conduct a thorough review of how past government and private sector policies, including those of the sainted Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield Blue Cross, may have made us more vulnerable to this once in a century die-off of our friends and family.

The dead deserve it and the living require it.