In a week when the Republicans attacked Planned Parenthood, the freedom of workers to bargain for a better life, programs that help middle class families and a whole lot more, the one thing they didn't challenge was the excessive profits of the health insurance industry.
In fact, they continued their relentless effort to undermine the Affordable Care Act, which will eliminate the worst of insurance company abuses (like arbitrary denials of our care) and put a check on out-of-control profits that fuel rising premiums that are crushing families and small businesses.
Yesterday Health Care for America Now released a report that shows that the big five insurers earned $11.7 billion in 2010 - a 51% increase since 2008 - as they cut the number of people insured by millions and reduced the share of premiums they spend on actual medical care. So they made more money by charging more and providing less. It's a great business model if you can swing it - sell a product for higher and higher prices, offer less and then try to deny services to your paying customers when they actually need it.
The big profit gains were led by UnitedHealth, which reported $4.6 billion in earnings last year, up 21 percent from the 2009. WellPoint, the parent of Blue Cross plans in 14 states, including New York, California, Virginia, Georgia, Missouri and Ohio, earned $2.9 billion, up 13 percent from 2009; Aetna made $1.8 billion, up 38 percent; Cigna recorded $1.3 billion, up 3 percent; and Humana took $1 billion, up 6 percent.
Unsurprisingly, the health insurance industry trade group didn't like our report. Robert Zirkelbach, a spokesman for America's Health Insurance Plans, described our conclusions as "misleading attacks ... motivated by an unpopular ideological agenda that seeks to destroy an important industry and turn the entire system over to Washington."
Wow. That's a tad hyperbolic, and it's not true. But it's predictable from an industry that makes money by avoiding risk and providing less care, and that is one of the largest political sponsors of congressional Republicans and spends millions to protect its uncontrolled ability to make unlimited profits.
According to a report by Public Campaign Action Fund, these five companies alone spent nearly $50 million lobbying lawmakers from 2008 to 2010, and their employees and political action committees spent more than $7.3 million on campaign contributions. Imagine what the rest of their industry spent!
Of course it's no shock that America's big insurance companies make huge amounts of money and then spend millions to own the Republican Party, which then protects their ability to make excessive profits and pay bloated CEO salaries. This is exactly why the consumer protections in the Affordable Care Act are so important. And it's what's wrong with a political system dominated by corporate money instead of people.
To see the profits report from Health Care for America Now, go to http://www.healthcareforamericanow.org/ins-co-2010-profits.
Follow Ethan Rome on Twitter: www.twitter.com/@HCAN
Their excuse was to pay for the research and development. When the media got the news out, the drug company relented and lowered the price to only $600 a dose.
Might as well let them print money and eliminate the cost they incur in drug production altogether. But wait, I think they have the hand of the right wingers turning that handle.
But just like what was demonstrated in the book "What's the matter with Kansas", the ignorant, uneducated, and the uninformed will vote against their own economic best self-interest, even if it kills them. And republican gov brewer in Arizona is just the person to take advantage of that public ignorance and has already started the death-panels.
- Insurance Companies
- Unions
- Corporations
How is it that this health care law, which is supposed to apply to everyone and be good for all, isn't good enough for these groups. The average person, you/me/Fred/Wilma, are required by law to follow this program and will suffer penalties if we don't, but these 1000 plus groups/companies are special somehow. It kind of sounds like political payoffs or elitism, doesn't it.
Dayne
So my question for the health insurance CEO is: How much of your business comes from selling overseas?
Answer: NONE.
For-profit health insurance companies AND THEIR EMPLOYEES are deadweight on America.
Fine article on the facts, but flawed as to the conclusions. PPACA will leave 20-25 million uninsured, tens of millions underinsured (with "bronze-level" plans), and contains none of the proven cost-control features employed by every other First World country. In fact, it will boost our healthcare expenditures from 17% of GDP currently to over 20% by the end of the decade (compared to 10%-12% in countries with genuinely universal coverage). The 15% and 20% caps on insurance company administrative costs and profits are far higher than the 2% to 6% seen in most of our peer countries, and unchecked by vigorous, fluid competition, they incorporate exactly the same expenditure-boosting incentives as cost-plus contracts -- because they *are* cost-plus contracts. (And if you are familiar with how insurance companies have divided up and dominated regional markets and set up their own exclusive and preferred provider networks, you know there is very little in the way of competition.)
The proper conclusion is not that we should be grateful for PPACA's meager patient protections, but that we should scrap private health insurance altogether in favor of an Improved Medicare For All (HR 676). Low administrative costs; no more copays or deductibles; no more medical bankruptcies; all providers "in-network"; irrevocable lifetime coverage; everybody in, nobody out.
I think the Dems didn't get it and the Republicans are completley wrong about why the did so well in
2010 just as the Dems did in 2008.
Gee, I wonder if their INCREASING PREMIUMS had anything to do with that. CrapCare was supposed to make premiums go DOWN, if I recall the ad nauseam campaign promise correctly.
This is CLASS WARFARE waged under our very noses and if it continues at this pace the result WILL BE DISASTROUS!
Their GREED has almost brought our country down and very recently. Insurance companies are the one's being subsidized under the current HCR. What more can they want?
Uhh, if memory serves, it was Obama who cut a quid-pro-quo deal with the insurance lobbyist, instantly caving into her demand that he chuck the public option and institute her little money-machine "mandate." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PwqSCJmbxk
I'll say. The two senior aids in Max Baucus's office, who literally wrote the bill, are former execs from Wellpoint and United HealthCare, as Howard Dean attests in this PBS/Frontline documentary: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/obamasdeal/view/?utm_campaign=viewpage&utm_medium=grid&utm_source=grid And the only reason we even have a mandate is because the insurance lobbyist insisted that the man of change institute her little money machine and drop the public option, if he wanted her cooperation in getting his "historic" legislation through. Ya don't get much more "integrated" than that.
Yet it's the Republican Party that's "owned" by the insurance companies, huh?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PwqSCJmbxk Try the Dem Party; specifically, the man of change, who couldn't have taken a running leap into bed with the lobbyists any faster if he'd tried. Max Baucus is also looking pretty "owned," from where I'm sitting.
President Obama threw out the concept of changing this as his first public speech on "Reform." After that there was no money to be saved.
You KNOW when you're hitting a nerve with the health insurers
when they come up out of their chairs (to denigrate you).
Too bad we aren't doing more "drilling". This industry is rotten.