Small Business Owners Stand Up To Giant Insurance Lobby
America's Health Insurance Plans (AHIP) kicked off its annual conference in Chicago this morning and health care reform is sure to be a major topic of discussion. Just over two weeks ago, AHIP CEO Karen Ignagni said her organization -- the nation's top health insurance ...
America's Health Insurance Plans (AHIP) kicked off its annual conference in Chicago this morning and health care reform is sure to be a major topic of discussion. Just over two weeks ago, AHIP CEO Karen Ignagni said her organization -- the nation's top health insurance lobby -- was "concerned" that the recently-passed House bill will increase health care costs for families and employers across the country and "significantly disrupt" coverage for millions more. This came after Ignagni's months of lip service to Democratic leaders about her support for their broad proposal. The group even commissioned a study to back up its conclusions about the bill, but the findings were largely dismissed for shoddy math and effectively refuted by the Congressional Budget Office's analysis.
Today, eight small business owners affiliated with the Main Street Alliance showed up at the conference with a simple question for Ignagni: Why is AHIP attempting to maintain the status quo? After sending a letter Friday requesting a meeting, the entrepreneurs were not surprisingly rebuffed. Instead, they appeared outside the conference, where they explained, one-by-one, how the exploding cost of health care premiums was making it difficult to operate profitably. Watch some excerpts:
Following the press event, the business owners took to the streets, joining hundreds of their friends and allies -- including numerous labor leaders and reform advocates -- in a protest across the street from the conference.
The crowd heard from Tom Balanoff of the SEIU Illinois State Council (which sponsors this website), Henry Tamarin of UNITE-HERE Local 1, Roberta Lynch of AFSCME Council 31, as well as former Cigna executive Wendell Potter, who characterized the current health care system as "a Wall Street Health Care takeover," (a similar sentiment to the one he expressed before a House subcommittee hearing this June).
This isn't the only reform-related event on the schedule this week in Illinois. Tomorrow, the Campaign for Better Health Care kicks off its annual conference with a debate between Gov. Pat Quinn and Democratic challenger Dan Hynes. Check back Thursday morning for our coverage.
Comments
I'm still hearing "strong" and "robust" public option out of HCAN. At what point do they finally admit that the public option in the House bill, one they called the example to be used by the Senate, is neither "strong" nor "robust" under their own definitions set forth earlier this year. The HCAN "robust" public option had 4 pillars:
1.National and available everywhere: A strong public health insurance option will be a national public health insurance program, available in all areas of the country. The insurance industry is made of of conglomerates that have national reach. In order to have the clout to compete with the insurance industry and keep them honest, the public health insurance option must be national as well.
2.Government appointed and accountable: The entire problem with private health insurance is that they aren’t accountable to you or me. A public health insurance option must have a different incentive. A public health insurance option doesn’t have to be a government entity necessarily, but its decision makers must be appointed by government and must be accountable to government.
3.Bargaining clout: The whole point of health reform is to lower health care costs. Clearly, the insurance industry has failed to lower costs when left to their own devices. As the President says, we need a strong public health insurance option to lower rates, change the incentives in our health care system, and keep the industry honest.
4.Ready on day one: The private health insurance industry has utterly failed to control health care costs or provide their customers the quality they’ve paid through the nose for. With one person going bankrupt every 30 seconds due to health care costs, we cannot afford to wait any longer for a real fix. We need the public health insurance option to start lowering prices now. That means no trigger.
When little of that appeared in the hearings and drafts, they went with Nancy Pelosi's Medicare +5% payment rate as the new "robust" public option. When that didn't appear in the bill, they said absolutely nothing and now are still referring to this as a "strong" or "robust" public option. At some point, don't they think someone is going to notice that this is not what they sold to us?
Well,personally I don't agree wiht the businessmen. The Administration is proposing an element in the new budget to move all uninsured adults on to a national plan. If this can pass through into law, which is not certain given the opposition of the Republican party, it will provide a bolt hole for all currently insured. If the premiums on private health insurance, which isn't a cheap health insurance continue to rise, more will move on to the national plan which, over time, could produce a single-payer system in the US. Now that would be an interesting social experiment.
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