Political Commentary: Joan McCarter

Providing Health Care Too Expensive? How about Fighting It?

By Joan McCarter, 8-07-09

I’ve been thinking a lot about Bill Schneider’s proposal for healthcare reform, that is, attaching the whole shebang as an amendment to some gun rights bill, and watch the Senate fall all over itself to get the bill passed, and get it passed fast. Seriously, I’d trade shoppers in the grocery store or local mall with loaded, concealed weapons for universal health coverage and an end to the insurance companies’ stranglehold over our access to care. A fair enough trade, I’d guess. Can you imagine America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP, the big guns in the healthcare denial business) and PhRMA taking on the NOA? Now that’d be a lobbyist cage match worth watching. The best part is that it would be over quickly, and maybe with less expense. Because with all of the insanity that August is bringing--the death threats, the hanging of representatives in effigy and the shouting down of any kind of reasonable discourse, it’s the money that is becoming surreal. To say that it is obscene is really understating the case, particularly since so much of the fight over reform swirls around now much it costs.

First and foremost, what’s going into the policy-makers’ coffers from the industry:

During the first half of 2009, health industry groups contributed almost $1.8 million to 18 lawmakers overseeing the House side of the action on an overhaul bill.

For 15 of the 18 congressional leaders, health-care-related PACs accounted for the largest or second-largest contributions each lawmaker received from any industry during the first six months of 2009, a CQ MoneyLine analysis of campaign finance reports shows....

Leading this year’s contributions from PACs representing a range of health care companies and professional associations were donations from doctors, who gave the top leaders $426,150 in the first six months. Pharmaceutical manufacturers gave $352,500, and hospitals followed with $134,800 in donations over the same period, the analysis shows.

That’s both sides of the aisle, by the way, because both sides are taking every advantage of every month this process drags out. It’s a gravy train for them, with industry pouring in all the money they can while they think (ok, know) it will make a difference. But some of it is slightly more targeted:

House Republican Leaders John Boehner (Ohio) and Eric Cantor (Va.) have taken roughly $60,000 from the health insurance company that owns the research firm the Lewin Group, regularly cited by opponents of health care reform, according to Federal Election Commission filings.

Cantor, meanwhile, recently urged his Republican colleagues, at the top of a summer-strategy memo, to refer voters to an “independent analysis by the Lewin Group” that makes that case that giving Americans a public health care option would cause more than 100 million people to lose their current coverage....

Boehner and his leadership PAC have taken in $29,125 and Cantor and his PAC have gotten $28,000 from UnitedHealth’s political action committee, not including what they’ve also gotten from the company’s executives and employees.

Insurance companies can certainly afford to fight reform, with their “astronomical" profits.

The top five earning insurance companies averaged profits of $1.56 billion in 2008 and reported spending an average of “more than 18 percent of their revenues on marketing, administration, and profits.” That year, CEO compensation for these companies ranged from $3 million to $24 million.

All this allowed them to spend more as much as $1.4 million a day lobbying against reform during the January to March reporting period, and we’re like to find out in the next day or two how much more was spent in the April-July quarter.

That’s $1.4 million every day from January until March, $126 million in total. That’d pay for a lot of health care. With the average annual premium for a family pegged at $12,680 annually, in 2008, the money spent by the industry on lobbying in the first three months of 2009 would pay the premiums for 9,936 families.

No wonder AHIP President and CEO Karen Ignani has completely rejected any form of competition in a plan, even Kent Conrad’s watered down “compromise” of co-ops, that great plan that’s supposed to bring in Republicans to support the Baucus Committee plan. With this kind of money at stake, competition is the last thing these free-market Republicans want.

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