Subject: [big campaign] New Huff Post from Creamer
From: [email-masked]
To: [email-masked], [email-masked]
Date: Wed, 24 Jun 2009 11:48:10 EDT
List-Id: <bigcampaign.googlegroups.com>

When Private  Insurers Claim They Can’t Compete Against a Public Health 
Insurance Option, They  Just Make Themselves Look Silly 

You’ve got  to give the private insurance companies credit for chutzpa.  
The argument that they have been making  to Congress – with straight faces – 
that they “can’t compete” against a public  health insurance plan is 
preposterous.  That’s because it is internally inconsistent.  
If it were true, then private health  insurance firms must be inherently 
unable to provide health insurance as  efficiently as the public sector.  And 
if that were true, why would our nation allow itself to be held  hostage by 
private insurance companies that unnecessarily siphon billions of  dollars 
of wasted health care dollars from our collective  pockets? 
Every time the private insurance companies – or their Republican  
apologists in Congress – make the argument that “private insurance companies  can’t 
compete”, they might as well dress up in clown suits and put on big red  
noses: they just look silly. 
President Obama pointed out the absurdity of the argument in his news  
conference yesterday: 
“Just conceptually, the notion that all these insurance companies who say  
they’re giving consumers the best possible deal, if they can’t compete 
against a  public plan as one option, with consumers making the decision what’s 
the best  deal, that defies logic.” 
The insurance executives are the first to tell us all about how much more  
efficient the private sector is at doing anything than the “government.”  
Do they mean to tell us that the “best  and the brightest” from private 
industry can’t compete with a “bunch of  government bureaucrats”? 
There is, of course, considerable evidence that private insurance  
companies are generally more inefficient than public insurance  plans.  For 
instance, only 3% of  every Medicare dollar goes to administrative costs, while from 
13% to 17% -- and  sometimes more – goes to administering and marketing 
private plans.   
Or there’s the fact that “MedicareAdvantage” plans – where private  
insurers are paid by Medicare to provide insurance for Medicare beneficiaries –  
have required about a 20% subsidy above the cost of providing insurance 
through  the regular Medicare system. 
But the image of the poor little private insurance companies arrayed  
against the public colossus is ridiculous.  One Republican went so far yesterday 
as to argue that the way a private  insurance company would compete against 
a public plan was the way a rabbit  competes with an alligator.  The  
private insurance companies are not cuddly cute little bunnies.  Many of them are 
giant multi-billion  dollar companies that have massive provider networks, 
longstanding client bases  and pay their CEO’s tens of millions of dollars.  
The real problem for private insurance  companies is not that they can’t 
compete with a public plan.  It is that they can’t compete and  continue to do 
business they way they want to do business.  And that, of course, is the 
point of a  public option – to change the behavior of the players in the 
health care market  to assure that everyone has access to quality health care, 
and to stop the  skyrocketing increase in health care costs. 
The whole idea of insurance is to spread risk.  Everyone pays into a common 
insurance  pool, so when anyone gets sick they can count on getting the 
health care they  need even if it costs far more than they could afford  
individually. 
But left to their own devices, private insurance companies have an  
ever-present incentive to minimize their own risk of paying out for  health care to 
their policyholders.  That’s why they try to select only customers who are 
well and get rid of  those who are sick.  That’s why it’s  in their 
interest to spend millions on armies of people whose only job is to  deny claims – 
a task that has no value in the broader scheme of the health care  system, 
but makes perfect sense from the standpoint of a private insurance  company.  
That’s why they don’t want  to take people with pre-existing conditions – 
because they are more likely to  get sick.  
And, private insurers are not in business to provide health care coverage  
for every American, or to slow the growth of health care costs.  They are in 
business to maximize return  for their investors and the pay of their top 
management.  So when left to their own devices,  private insurers  generate 
huge  profits and pay their CEO’s tens of millions of dollars.  
The entry of a public insurance  option into the health insurance 
marketplace would change the rules of the  game.  If consumers had a public  option, 
who in their right mind would sign up with a company that would  discontinue 
your policy if you got cancer or had a heart attack?  Who would join a plan 
where they had to  pay for bloated executive salaries – or had to regularly 
do battle with an  insurance bureaucrat in order to get a claim paid?  Why 
do seniors like Medicare?  They don’t have to contend with these  kinds of 
problems.  They have  secure, reliable health insurance. 
So to compete, private insurance companies would be forced to change the  
way they do business.  They would  have to end all of those practices that 
American consumers have grown to hate,  cut administrative costs – maybe even 
cut CEO pay.  Of course since the CEO of Cigna makes  $26 million – 65 times 
the salary of the President of the United States –  he could afford several 
million dollars in belt-tightening.   
They could compete – but they  would have to change the way they compete.  
That’s what they are fighting tooth and nail to avoid – and that’s also  
the whole point of health care reform: to change the incentives that determine 
 how the players in the health insurance market do business day to day.   
Of  course there is another reason why all the concern about the 
competitiveness of  private insurers is so absurd.  The  point of health insurance 
reform is not to benefit the private insurance  companies.  It is to provide  
everyone access to quality, affordable health care – and to control exploding 
 health care costs.   
It’s up to every  one who cares about health care – and the future of our 
economy – to make sure  Members of Congress remember what is really at stake 
in the health care debate.  And it’s not the health of the private health 
insurance  industry. 
Robert Creamer is a longtime political organizer and strategis,t 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) 

**************Make your summer sizzle with fast and easy recipes for the 
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