It's summer, officially the time for health insurance companies to jack up individual health insurance premiums by double digits. Such is the case of Regence BlueCross BlueShield of Oregon, about to increase their never ending shrinking health care coverage by 22.1% on average:

Concerns about surging health care costs drove more than 150 people Thursday to hear Oregon's largest health insurer defend its request to raise premiums an average 22 percent.

In the Oregon Insurance Division's first public hearing for a rate request in more than 20 years, administrator Teresa Miller grilled the president of Regence BlueCross BlueShield of Oregon.

Then Laura Etherton, a health policy advocate for the Oregon State Public Interest Research Group, urged the division to reject the request.

"It is not justified, and it will only make matters worse," she said.

BlueCross sticks it to the self-employed or any other small business buying individual policies every year, with a never ending shrinking pool of customers, now down to 59,447. They used to cover over 100,000 in Oregon but clearly people are dropping out because they cannot afford the premiums. Even with health insurance, these individual policies do not provide enough coverage.

Have you noticed despite the never ending jobs crisis, Jobs are removed from the political dialog? The unemployed are no longer mentioned? Or if they are, we get absurd nonsense policy that will actually do the opposite? Ship more jobs overseas and lose jobs?

Paul Krugman calls out this sweeping the unemployed under the rug, in an op-ed, Against Learned Helplessness. Krugman calls for policies, that would actually work, to create jobs.

we could have W.P.A.-type programs putting the unemployed to work doing useful things like repairing roads — which would also, by raising incomes, make it easier for households to pay down debt. We could have a serious program of mortgage modification, reducing the debts of troubled homeowners. We could try to get inflation back up to the 4 percent rate that prevailed during Ronald Reagan’s second term, which would help to reduce the real burden of debt.

Right on Krugman and if only politicians would follow the call. What Krugman doesn't mention is the trade deficit or confronting China on currency manipulation, which once again, we get more inaction by Geithner on China:

The Obama administration on Friday declined to cite China for manipulating its currency to gain trade advantages against the United States but said the pace of the currency's rise against the dollar needs to be accelerated.