Subject: [big campaign] New Huff Post from Creamer -- Stranglehold of Insurance Companies on Health Care
From: [email-masked]
To: [email-masked], [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 7 Sep 2009 23:41:12 EDT
List-Id: <bigcampaign.googlegroups.com>

The Question is Not a “Government Takeover” –But Rather  -- Will Congress 
Allow Insurance Companies to Consolidate Their Stranglehold on  Health Care? 

As Congress reconvenes, Republicans and insurance companies are trying  
their hardest to frame the health care debate as President Obama’s attempt to  
engineer a “government takeover” of the nation’s health care  system. 
In fact the real question is whether Congress will allow the big private  
health insurance companies to consolidate their current stranglehold over our 
 health care.   
If you are too young for Medicare, too old for the State Children’s  Health 
Insurance Program, and not poor enough for Medicaid, you are stuck –  
completely relying on the whims, procedures and bureaucracy of private health  
insurance companies.   
I can’t count the number of times I have walked into a doctor’s office to  
find her on the phone with a private insurance company bureaucrat in some  
far-away city – most with no medical training – debating whether she can 
provide  a treatment that she, the physician, thinks is necessary to protect 
the health  of a patient. 
Sometimes these anonymous, unaccountable private bureaucrats make  
decisions that – in effect – determine that the life of the patient is simply  not 
worth the cost to the insurance company.   
Take the well-known case of Nataline Sarkisian.  Doctors said a liver 
transplant could  save her life.  But Cigna, her  insurance company, wouldn’t pay 
for it.  Nataline died just before Christmas in 2007.  She was 17 years  
old. 
At the end of this year when Cigna CEO Ed Hanway retires, he will get a  
$73 million retirement package.  The  average liver transplant costs $250,000. 
 So Hanway’s golden parachute would have paid for 292 liver  transplants.  
Nataline only needed  one. 
I talk to dozens of people every week who have horror stories about the  
stranglehold of the insurance companies.   
Like  the fifty-year-old husband whose wife just got cancer.  He is 
terrified he may be laid off from  his job of 20 years because even if he gets 
another one, the next insurance  company won’t cover her cancer since it will be 
a “pre-existing”  condition. 
Or the small business owner who has always covered his employees and  
family with a health insurance policy and now is facing the choice of canceling  
the coverage or going out of business because next year’s rates just went up 
 50%. 
With private health insurance companies like these, average people have  no 
recourse.  They can’t go to their  Congressman and demand that rates be 
controlled as they can with Medicare.  They can’t throw insurance executives  
out of office, as they can if they don’t like a politicians vote on a tax  
increase.  
And let’s not pretend that the “free market” forces these companies to  
compete for our business by providing the lowest prices and best service.  In 
fact, the health insurance industry  is anything but competitive. 
An AMA survey, released in late January, gives a score gauging the  
concentration of the commercial market for 314 metropolitan statistical areas.  The 
report showed 94% had commercial markets that were "highly concentrated" by 
 standards set by the Federal Trade Commission and Justice  Department. 
In Maine, for instance, one company – Wellpoint –  had 71% of the market.  
The second  competitor was Aetna with only 12%.   
Let’s remember that insurance companies are exempt from the Federal  
Anti-Trust Laws. 
Nor are  they subject to market concentration limits like those imposed by 
the Federal  Communications Commission to prevent the domination of one 
media company in a  particular area.  It is certainly  important to prevent one 
company from controlling the messages that are  broadcast into our homes.  
But isn’t  it equally important to prevent one or two companies from 
controlling our access  to health care? 
You can see the results of this concentration in the marketplace. In the  
second quarter, one of the largest insurers, United Health Care Group lost  
410,000 customers – largely because the recession caused massive layoffs.  
Unbelievably, its profits actually  doubled to $860 million.  The main  
reason: it simply raised its prices.   
The law of supply and demand would lead us to expect that when demand  
drops, prices will drop too.  But  not if you’re a big insurance company that 
has oligopolies in many of its  markets – and sells a product that is an 
absolute  necessity. 
Any wonder why big insurance companies don’t want competition from  the 
public insurance plan proposed by President Obama?   
No, the private health insurance industry likes things just the way they  
are.  They want to be free to  continue raising prices almost four times 
faster than wages – so their profits  can soar in good times and bad.  They want 
to be free to pay their CEO’s an average of $8.5 million per  year – 21 
times more than the CEO of the United  States, the  President. 
They want to continue employing armies of people who do nothing but  reject 
claims – not because that contributes one bit to the health care of their  
customers, but because it raises their bottom  lines. 
They want to keep spending hundreds of millions of dollars on marketing  
and administration because that also helps them make more money, though it is  
simply waste when it comes to overall spending on health  care. 
Remember health insurance companies don’t deliver one iota of health care  
to patients.  They are middlemen who  skim off a chunk of every health care 
dollar that passes through their  hands.  They have no incentive  whatsoever 
to improve the health of their clientele or control overall health  care 
spending in our economy – only to increase their bottom line and the  salaries 
and bonuses of the executives who are now empowered to – in essence –  
make life and death decisions.  
The private health insurance companies would be happy to kill President  
Obama’s health insurance reform plan dead in its tracks – the same way they  
killed the Clinton plan fifteen years ago.   
But they feel that health insurance reform is going to pass, they and  
their Republican allies will do everything in their power to make sure that it  
actually consolidates their power instead of weakening it. AHIP, the 
association  of private health insurance companies, has ads promoting “bipartisan” 
health  care.   They would be happy for the government to  force 
individuals and companies to buy their product – only  without any restrictions on 
their ability  to raise prices, deny coverage to people with pre-existing 
conditions, rescind  policies after someone gets sick, or refuse to pay for 
necessary procedures –  and certainly without a requirement that they compete 
with a public health  insurance plan.  If they got their  way, their power over 
our health care system would actually  increase. 
If, on the other  hand, they are subject to new regulations such as those 
proposed by President  Obama – and forced to compete with a government health 
insurance plan that  focuses on patient care and not the bottom line – we 
will not only join the  ranks of industrial nations that provides health care 
for all – we will also  break the stranglehold of health insurance 
companies on our nation’s health care  system. 
The battle is on.  Remind  your Members of Congress that none of them took 
an oath to protect the profits  of private insurance companies. 
Robert Creamer is a longtime political  organizer and strategist, and 
author of the recent book:  Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can  Win, 
available on _Amazon.com._ 
(http://www.amazon.com/Listen-Your-Mother-Straight-Progressives/dp/0979585295/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1213241439&sr=8-1) 

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