Health Care For America Now

Great work…we need more of these rallys to counter the lies put forth by the tea baggers,fox and friends,and corporate interests. GET THE WORD OUT! Thanks

It was a fantastic rally with thousands and thousands of people!!!!!!!!! These are THE PEOPLE !!!!
Insurers have responded to the administration’s campaign against recent rate hikes by blaming increasing health care costs, provider cost increases and adverse selection (healthier Americans are dropping coverage) for their premium increases. To hear them tell it, the insurance industry is a low-profit industry that spends just one cent of every premium dollar on administration and strives to reduce costs by encouraging efficiencies. Insurers “do not deserve to be vilified for political purposes,” Robert Zirkelbach, a spokesman for America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP) told the AP:

For every dollar spent on health care in America, less than one penny goes toward health plan profits. The focus needs to be on the other 99 cents.

But the argument that insurers run a tight ship is misleading, on several counts, not least of which is the fact that insurers are planning to spend “more than $1 million” not on health care claims — as their justification for the premium hikes would suggest — but “to run television ads on cable stations nationwide beginning in the next few days to push back on the attacks on insurers.”

That $1 million ad fund will presumably come from the one penny that goes towards health care profits. But this too is misleading. Zirkelbach is clever enough to compare the private insurance industry’s administrative spending to national health care expenditures — 45 percent of which includes spending in Medicare, Medicaid and other public programs. In the context of total spending, insurers administrative costs may look small, but compared to the revenues of private insurers, administrative spending is seen as far more substantial. Insurers skim off 15-20 percent of premium dollars for administrative costs and profits which fund TV ad campaigns, Washington lobbyists, lavish company retreats and outlandish CEO salaries.

The top five earning insurance companies averaged profits of $12.2 billion, an increase of $4.4 billion, or 56 percent, from 2008. And in 2008 (the last year for which data was available), CEO compensation for these companies ranged from $3 million to $24 million.” Below is a partial list of insurer/CEO profits:
Insurer: Company Profits 2009: CEO Total Compensation 2008 Or Earlier: CEO 5 Year Compensation:
UnitedHealth Group $3.8 billion $5 million –
WellPoint $4.75 billion $4 million –
Atena $1.28 billion $38 million $77 million
Humana $1 billion $2 million $56 million
Cigna $1.3 billion $10 million $121 million

Insurer profits increased even in the midst of the current recession. Last week, during a hearing before the House Energy and Commerce Health Subcommittee, WellPoint admitted that it increased premiums to keep up with medical costs and maintain a 2% profit. The company’s 2009 fourth quarter net income “was more than $2.7 billion, a 727 percent increase from the fourth quarter of last year” — even as membership declined by some 4 percent.

Insurer profits are of course just one culprit for increasing premiums, but considering that insurers have been able to increase their returns by purging sicker Americans from the rolls and pulling out of competitive markets, the President’s strong rhetoric is more than justified. The Senate bill will start forcing insurers to earn profit by figuring out ways to deliver quality care more efficiently and they’re not very interested in accepting these changes.

They rate hike and squeeze every pennies at the expense of the American lives and families to raise money to defeat the reform that save millions American families. In other words, they're not only screwing us twice over but also screwing us harder to make sure that they continue have an insurance of, or retain that control on our lives, screwing us more in the future. Funny, how that works. But that's what they're doing!!!

Jason,

It seems more than a bit disingenuous to me to "arrest" the insurance companies so you can throw federal subsidies and mandated customers at them. When does common sense take over and we drop the senate bill in favor of expanding Medicare by reconciliation. You'd get no more pushback than you're already getting on the current pending legislation and that's what makes this entire thing suspicious.

Ellen

[...] about the March 9th action in this AFSCME WORKS Online Xtra and in posts on the AFL-CIO Now and Health Cate for America NOW! [...];