The Insurers' Real Agenda for Change - Wendell Potter

[Donnachaidh]

http://www.opednews.com/articles/The-Insurers-Real-Agenda-by-Wendell-Potter-110212-683.html

The media had lots of health care news to obsess about last week. A federal judge ruled the health care reform law unconstitutional, and Senate Republicans tried in vain to repeal the law. But most of the press paid virtually no attention to a potentially much more important development -- a multi-pronged effort by five major insurers to strip from the law key regulations and consumer protections that aren't to their liking.

The insurers do not want the bill repealed or declared unconstitutional. Congress gave them exactly what they wanted by including in the legislation a requirement that all Americans not eligible for Medicare or Medicaid buy coverage from a private insurance company. That provision alone will result in hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue and profits the insurers otherwise would never see.

Officially, the insurers are maintaining neutrality on the court challenges to the law and the repeal efforts. They understand that Republican attorneys general who filed the lawsuits and the Congressional Republicans who voted to repeal the law -- most of whom received campaign contributions from the insurers' political action committees -- must go through the motions to satisfy "the base."

The court challenges and repeal efforts are, in reality, a useful smokescreen for the big insurers, whose real agenda is to gut the law while preserving the mandate. Expect a big lobbying and PR campaign -- financed by our insurance premiums -- to persuade us that the new regulations and consumer protections will make those premiums skyrocket.

More at the link --

[kenny blankenship]

1. They'll fix it later!

Like we knew they would.

[leftstreet]

2. CHECKMATE

[slipslidingaway]

3. Private insurance companies push for 'individual mandate'

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=389&topic_id=6083122&mesg_id=6083122

"As momentum gains for reforms, insurers hope to turn it to their advantage by supporting a proposal that everyone buy coverage. It would be a boost for the industry, which has seen enrollment decline.


...But this time, it turns out, the health insurance industry has good reason to support at least some change: It needs it. Private health insurance faces a bleak future if the proposal they champion most vigorously -- a requirement that everyone buy medical coverage -- is not adopted.

...Insurers do not embrace all of the healthcare restructuring proposals. But they are fighting hard for a purchase requirement, sweetened with taxpayer-funded subsidies for customers who can't afford to buy it on their own, and enforced with fines.

...The industry's real trouble begins in 2011, when 79 million baby boomers begin turning 65. Health insurers stand to lose a huge slice of their commercially insured enrollment (estimated at 162 million to 172 million people) over the next two decades to Medicare, the government-funded health insurance program for seniors..."


For insurers, getting "run over" would be the adoption of a so-called single-payer plan, where the government pays all medical bills. Such a plan would wreak havoc on the private insurance market, and is widely viewed as politically unfeasible this year. So the best way for the industry to preserve the private insurance market -- and derail the campaign for a single-payer system -- may be to go along with more palatable proposals on the table now, said Jeffrey Miles, a healthcare analyst and president of the Miles Organization, a Los Angeles insurance brokerage firm..."

AHIP commercial for health care reform - "If everyone is covered..." equals mandate.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=389&topic_id=6494081&mesg_id=6494618

[slipslidingaway]

4. kick n/t