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The International Markets segment offers supplemental health, life, and accident insurance products; and health care coverage, as well as health care benefits to mobile employees of multinational organizations. This segment offers health coverage, hospitalization, dental, critical illness, personal accident, term life, and variable universal life products. The Group Disability and Other segment provides group long-term and short-term disability, group life, accident, voluntary, and specialty insurance products, as well as related services; permanent insurance contracts to corporations to provide coverage on How to buy cigna stock the lives of certain employees for the purpose of financing employer-paid future benefit obligations; and reinsurance, settlement annuity, individual life insurance, and annuity and retirement benefit business.Its commercial operating segment encompasses the United States commercial and certain international healthcare businesses serving employers and their employees, other groups, and individuals. Its Global Supplemental Benefits segment offers supplemental health, life and accident insurance products in selected international markets and in the United States. Its Group Disability and Life segment provides group long-term and short-term disability insurance, group life insurance, accident and specialty insurance and related services.The combination of Cigna with Express Scripts integrates two complementary health care service companies, each with industry-leading cost trend capabilities, that together, are positioned to deliver better care, expanded choice and drive down health care costs. With Express Scripts, Cigna can dramatically accelerate the number and breadth of value-based relationships. This model of partnership aligns incentives to clinical outcomes, not just consumption of the medication or health care services, adding to Cigna's rapidly expanding collaborative care network. These relationships will be further strengthened by our comprehensive analytics platform, which is based on insights from one billion annual customer touchpoints, and is designed to drive transparency and engagement with clients and customers.

What we know today as ‘single payer healthcare’ started with the “Social Insurance and Allied Services,” or “The Beveridge Report” on social policy, back in the middle of WWII Britain. It’s named after Sir William Beveridge, an economist, social reformer, and leader of the Liberal Party, who in 1942 presented a comprehensive report to the British Parliament on how Britain should rebuild itself after the war. The report contained recommendations for the creation of a system that would establish the tax-based British National Health Service (NHS). Indeed the NHS became the ‘cradle-to-grave’ insurance and health delivery system covering all British citizens. It came into existence on July 5th, 1948 and was the first health system in the world to offer tax-based medical care to an entire national population. It was also the first universal healthcare system not to be based on the insurance principle, but rather on the freely offered provision of state-provided healthcare made available to each citizen. In other words, it was the first single payer healthcare system with universal coverage.Since then a number of countries have modeled their healthcare systems on the NHS by creating a hybrid version that works for them. Countries like the UK and Canada have used the principles of sound management and regulations with teeth to control their healthcare costs and in the process have achieved better health outcomes at a much lower cost compared to the US. Regionally-based financing systems are better able to manage the budgets allocated to both their public hospitals and the physicians who distribute care privately.In the United States there’s been knee-jerk opposition to any such ‘socialized’ healthcare delivery models, despite conclusive evidence that the citizens in Canada and other high-income countries with these systems live longer and with better quality of life (82.3 years in Canada—up 0.4 years since 2013 vs. 78.6 years in the US, lower for 3 consecutive years). Fewer Canadian infants die before their first birthday, maternal mortality is considerably lower and overall medical outcomes favor Canada in comparative studies. Many Americans have observed these benefits from afar and want to know how other countries are doing it.From a cost of delivery perspective, the massive cost of waste, fraud and abuse, higher than necessary administration costs, the much higher cost of drugs and avaricious corporate profit-taking represent the largest differences between the US and countries with single payer healthcare. In 2018 healthcare spending per capita in the US is $10,900, the highest cost of any nation in the world, and twice as high as countries with universal government-regulated healthcare systems. For example, Canada’s cost per capita is $5100 US or about half. While Canada expects healthcare prices to rise marginally in the next few years, there’s no end in sight to the acceleration of medical inflation rates in the US; per capita spending is expected to rise to over $15,000 per person by 2023.A primary difference is that in Canada, the UK and about 30 other OECD countries, healthcare is regarded as a ‘right;’ in the United States, it is not. This means that the US doesn't actually have a healthcare system, just a health insurance system that’s focused mainly on profits in the treatment of patients, while Canada's and the UK’s objectives are directed toward best patient outcomes. Both Canadians and Brits each regard their healthcare systems as the best thing about being Canadian or British.The US healthcare system is also employer-based, a concept that is difficult for Americans to fully remove from their thinking when trying to envision what healthcare reform might look like. Without constitutional standing, the US health insurance system has been organized to deny services, not support the right to healthcare. Meanwhile, Canadian healthcare funding is not directly tied to employment. Employers are not involved. There is no loss of coverage if you lose or change your job or move to another province. In fact if you never held a job throughout your entire life, it wouldn’t affect your basic medical coverage. Like the sentiment of the American activist Medicare-for-all slogan, everybody is in, and nobody is out.The main reason Americans have yet to establish such a system, is that despite efforts by many in the past including Roosevelt and Truman, the insurance industry and its allies, the pharmaceutical companies known collectively as the medical-industrial complex, spend a lot of money ensuring the future of the current system. Money in politics makes the United States particularly vulnerable to political corruption. Money funds special interest groups and lobbyists who can easily mount anti-socialist campaigns, anti-Canadian-style healthcare campaigns, smear campaigns, engage in the fragmentation of public policy to divide, conquer and discredit any worthwhile reform legislation. Currently, there is no equally well-heeled and influential group in the US countering that misinformation.In his book, ‘Deadly Spin,’ Wendell Potter, a former PR executive at one of the largest health insurance companies, Cigna, has given us the playbook fundamentals used by the medical industrial complex to subvert truth. He lists a vast array of activities that the big health insurance companies engage in, including hiring PR firms, setting up phony ‘citizens’ action groups’ or coalitions (preferably with the words ‘freedom’ or ‘American’ or ‘choice’ in the title), along with money laundering to disguise who the funders are. Given the ease with which a great number of Americans’ minds can be influenced by disinformation campaigns, it is not surprising that many Americans distrust a group of reform activists and leading politicians on the left who promote a healthcare system that by its nature must involve more government regulation.But there must be a cognitive dissonance in the minds of Americans who have bought in to the medical industry’s attacks on so-called ‘socialist healthcare.’ In July 2019, in a move that will surely add to the Medicare-for-all debate in the US, the current Administration announced that it would allow Americans to legally import less expensive prescription drugs from Canada. After years of going along with the drug lobby's attack on the Canadian healthcare system and doing everything in its power to support high US drug prices, the move flies in the face of the politically powerful pharmaceutical industry.The move was necessary because busloads of American diabetics were crossing the Canadian border daily to purchase their insulin prescriptions in Canada at one-tenth of the price it sells for in the US. National publicity of these daily events was starting to make the ruling Party look heartless and uncaring when it came to supporting cheaper prescription drugs as they say they do.Nonetheless, the cross-border drug-seeking continues at an accelerating rate. While it's unrealistic to expect that the Canadians should also become the stewards of the floundering American healthcare system, the announcement by the US administration is the political equivalent of waving a white flag. And it should cause us to ask the key question: “If the so called ‘socialist’ Canadian Medicare system can deliver drugs to Americans at one-tenth of the US price, what else can it do?”If we truly believe that the private sector can deliver cheaper healthcare more efficiently than the public sector, then all Americans deserve an explanation from both industry and lawmakers as to how private healthcare that costs twice as much as it does in countries with so-called ‘socialized medicine’ is benefiting us as taxpayers.