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Insurers mount attack against health reform – Can you blame them?

Mr. Alonso-Zaldivar seems to have an opinion on health care, of course I do as well so what follows is my rebuttal to his AP article.

Insurers mount attack against health reform

By RICARDO ALONSO-ZALDIVAR, Associated Press Writer Ricardo Alonso-zaldivar, Associated Press Writer – 2 hrs 27 mins ago

WASHINGTON – After working for months behind the scenes to help shape health care reform, the insurance industry is now sharply attacking the emerging plan with a report that maintains Senate legislation would increase the cost of a typical policy by hundreds, or even thousands, of dollars a year.

Of course the insurance companies are going to most likely attack ANYTHING that will put them in competition with the government, it's just common sense. The government seeks to put them out of business COMPLETELY, and they know it. Obama, Frank, and others have been quoted on multiple YouTube videos where they touted their support for a single payer, government "option" which they only quieted when the heat got turned on.

A spokesman for Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., whose 10-year, $829 billion overhaul plan faces a final Finance Committee vote Tuesday, was quick to react Sunday, questioning the credibility of the industry's late-in-coming cost estimate.

Unfortunately, we don't have access to this legislation because Pelosi & company are blocking efforts to post these things online... WTF??? Where's the transparency in THAT??? Weren't we promised government transparency??? Since I cannot view this material directly I can only question it's source, Max Baucus, and ask what qualifies him to author such legislation other than he's a lawyer that votes with his party 91.9% of the time? What past expertise has he exhibited in the field of health care that demonstrates <i>any</i> level of competence in this industry? NONE that I can find... This is troubling, a lawyer/career politician of mediocre distinction being made responsible for my health...

It's a health insurance company hatchet job, plain and simple," said the spokesman, Scott Mulhauser.

I'm sure it is, but I'm thankful for their efforts for the vast majority of us who oppose government run health care don't have the finances to carry the fight. Insurance companies are doing the right thing, albeit possibly for the wrong reasons.

The health insurance industry has been working until recently to help draft legislation, while publicly endorsing President Barack Obama's goal of affordable coverage for all Americans. The alliance has grown strained as legislation advances toward votes in Congress.

There was no "alliance" to begin with... In layman's terms, the government is muscling in on the insurance companies with moves designed to eventually phase them out all together, and naturally they're resisting. Besides, didn't Obama himself say that those who "created the problem" need to "get out of the way"? That doesn't sound like the words of one who is in the mood for negotiation.

Late Sunday, the industry trade group America's Health Insurance Plans sent its member companies a new accounting firm study that projects the legislation would add $1,700 a year to the cost of family coverage in 2013, when most of the major provisions in the bill would be in effect.

Premiums for a single person would go up by $600 more than would be the case without the legislation, the PricewaterhouseCoopers analysis concluded in the study commissioned by the insurance group.

Several major provisions in the current legislative proposal will cause health care costs to increase far faster and higher than they would under the current system," Karen Ignagni, the top industry lobbyist in Washington, wrote in a memo to insurance company CEOs.

The study projected that in 2019, family premiums could be $4,000 higher and individual premiums could be $1,500 higher.

All this discussion of money and we're still talking about a plan that will leave an estimated 25 million still uninsured: http://cboblog.cbo.gov/?p=387 Think about what we're talking about here for a second in simple terms... We're on the brink of introducing legislation which will create more government bureaucracy, cost more money, consolidate more power, reduces freedom, yet falls well short of it's intended purpose... Only from the Ivy-League minds in government does such "higher thinking" exist... If ANY such legislation passes without full coverage for all legal residents, one simply MUST assume there is an ulterior motive other than health care.

Baucus spokesman Mulhauser said the study is "seriously flawed" because it doesn't take into account provisions in the legislation that would lower the cost of coverage, such as tax credits to help people buy private insurance, protections for current policies and administrative savings from a revamped marketplace.

White House health care spokeswoman Linda Douglass concurred. "This is an insurance industry analysis that is designed to reach a conclusion which benefits the industry, and does not represent what the bill does," she said.

Okay, why not let us read it for ourselves? We know what the insurance companies are worried about, and rightfully so... YOU people want some generic spokesperson to TELL us what it's all about without actually releasing the information online... None of us would buy a car or a house without anything but an explanation by the seller to go on, you want to read the contract before you sign, why should this be any different? If anything, it's MORE important because after all, we're talking about our LIVES here.

The Baucus plan faces a final committee vote on Tuesday. It got a boost last week when the Congressional Budget Office estimated it would cover 94 percent of eligible Americans while reducing the federal deficit.

Reducing the federal deficit by spending more money? Is there any precedent for such a thing? The only way the government reduces costs is by cutting services to the people... Any time there are budget short falls, standard procedure on the state as well as federal level is to cut police, fire, education, anything they can hold over you to tell you that not giving them more of your money is going to hurt YOU, not them. Give them control of health care and it will be no different than the state of medicare and medicaid, both of which will be reduced to fund the new program.

But the PricewaterhouseCoopers analysis attempted to get at a different issue — costs for privately insured individuals.

It concluded that a combination of factors in the bill — and decisions by lawmakers as they amended it — would raise costs.

There's the bottom line... Raise costs, raise control, reduce choice, all the while never insuring ALL legal residents, which is why we supposedly got into this to begin with.

The chief reason, said the report, is a decision by lawmakers to weaken proposed penalties for failing to get health insurance. The bill would require insurers to take all applicants, doing away with denials for pre-existing health problems. In return, all Americans would be required to carry coverage, either through an employer or a government program, or by buying it themselves.

Another choice has been made for you by a lawyer entrenched in government.

But the CBO estimated that even with new federal subsidies, some 17 million Americans would still be unable to afford health insurance. Faced with that affordability problem, senators opted to ease the fines for going without coverage from the levels Baucus originally proposed. The industry says that will only let people postpone getting coverage until they get sick.

Let's see here, we're talking about fining people who don't have the money for health care to begin with. WTF is that? When they can't pay the fine, then what? Jail? Forced community service? This is simply another example of the "kindly liberal" running right over the people they claim to be championing. They're doing this for the poor, yet it's the poor who are punished most severely.

Other factors leading to higher costs include a new tax on high-cost health insurance plans, cuts in Medicare payments to hospitals and doctors, and a series of new taxes on insurers and other health care industries, the report said.

Health reform could have a significant impact on the cost of private health insurance coverage," it concluded.

Governmentspeak for "we're going to run private insurance out of business by making unaffordable".

Insurers played a major role in defeating then-President Bill Clinton's health care plan in the 1990s. Sunday, the industry stopped short of signaling all-out opposition. "We will continue to work with policymakers in support of workable bipartisan reform," Ignagni said in her memo.

Bi-partisan reform? Since when do Democrats give a rat's behind about the GOP's opinion about anything? What happen to that, "we won, we get to make the rules" rhetoric I was hearing so much of in the beginning of the Obama administration? As public support continues to wane for this latest sham, so does Democrat resolve... They currently enjoy a super majority and can literally pass legislation at will, without GOP support. They simply don't have the stones to go it alone, lest they end up right where the GOP is now. In exile...

At some point these people are going to have to be reigned in if we are to save this great republic. We cannot continue to allow our governments to be run by self-serving lawyers who all went to a lot of the same schools. At the end of the day, the current challenges that face this nation are a product of government and we're seeing the same old story. Create the problem, then claim to be able to solve it, and charge handsomely for doing so... Doesn't anybody read about the The Pied Piper growing up anymore?

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