Insurance industry positions itself for the fight ahead
By CHRIS FRATES
Politico
12/3/08
With President-elect Barack Obama showing no signs of backing off his pledge to push health care reform early in his administration, jockeying is intensifying among interest groups to position themselves for the fight ahead.
The latest to step forward: the health insurance industry.
America’s Health Insurance Plans, the industry trade group, rolled out a plan Wednesday that embraces some of Obama’s ideas and signals dissent with others.
The industry’s proposal would require individuals to carry insurance and insurers to cover pre-existing conditions. And it would strengthen the health care safety net and provide tax credits to working families to help buy insurance.
The insurers say their plan would build on the employer-based system that provides most Americans with their health insurance — also an idea Obama supports.
What it doesn’t include is a public health insurance option that would compete with private plans, a concept supported by Obama and progressive groups such as Health Care for America Now.
“We don’t see that there will be a need for an additional public option. We don’t think there will be a need to get the government in the insurance business,” said the group’s spokesman, Michael Tuffin.
The industry has begun shopping its plan on Capitol Hill, paying particular attention to the Senate, where Health Committee Chairman Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) and Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) are working on legislative proposals. It also began building a grassroots army that they can mobilize when legislation starts moving.
“The insurance industry has advanced serious proposals that deserve serious analysis and consideration,” said Kennedy spokesman Anthony Coley.
But Health Care for America Now said the insurance industry’s proposal doesn’t make insurance more affordable. For instance, it doesn’t prevent companies from charging sick and elderly beneficiaries more.
“What they’re trying to do politically is to get ahead of health care reform and shape health care reform in such a way to protect their bottom line as opposed to actually fixing the problems in the health care system,” said the group’s national campaign manager, Richard Kirsch.
He criticized the industry’s plan to prevent medical bankruptcy by providing tax credits to low-income families that would cap total health care expenses instead of offering more affordable plans — a move that Kirsch put this way: “We’ll continue to let you go bankrupt, and we’ll have the government bail you out.”
The industry addresses the affordability issue by calling on Congress to reduce health care costs by 30 percent.
The nation’s largest nurses union has an idea for how to cut those costs: eliminate the insurance industry and switch to a single-payer system. About 30 percent of the system’s cost is from insurance company profits and administration costs, said Rose Ann DeMoro, executive director of the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee.
“It’s the Marshall Plan for insurance industry profits, because they use all the arms of government to force people to buy their failed product,” she said. “What their proposal does is privatize profits and socialize risk.”