On Tuesday, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters that the president did not believe the public option had the votes to pass the Senate even through reconciliation. It was, not surprisingly, not included in the president’s final bill.

Though the White House and Democratic leadership in the House have pronounced the death of the public option, advocates for the provision are not giving up efforts to get it passed via reconciliation in the Senate.

The Progressive Change Campaign Committee is targeting seven Democratic senators who have yet to sign a letter urging Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) to go down this route.

The target list includes Sens. Chris Dodd (Conn.), Evan Bayh (Ind.), Mark Warner (Va.) and Jim Webb (Va.), Russ Feingold (Wisc.), Herb Kohl (Wisc.) and Claire McCaskill (Mo).

The Wellpoint news may prove to be an effective catalyst to getting recalcitrant senators on board.

In 11 states where WellPoint is “active,” individual premium are expected to rise by double digits. Those states include California, Colorado, Connecticut, Georgia, Indiana, Maine, Nevada, New Hampshire, New York, Virginia, and Wisconsin.

[Source: Huffington Post]

These guys need to be jacked up!

One way health insurance companies can afford million dollar salaries for their executives is to get rid of their sickest insurance holders.

trying to maximize profits by purging its sickest customers while spending millions on exorbitant salaries and retreats for its executives, congressional Democrats said Wednesday.

Rep. Henry Waxman, chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, said at a hearing on WellPoint Inc. that his panel’s investigators had received internal company documents showing that in 2008, 39 company executives received salaries of $1 million or more. And in 2007 and 2008, it spent $27 million for 103 executive retreats.

Waxman says “Corporate executives at WellPoint are thriving, but its policy holders are pay the price.”

WellPoint owns Anthem Blue Cross which wants to raise its rates by 39% in some instances.

[Read more →]

WellPoint health insurance company, which has encouraged its employees to lobby against health care reform, is now cutting their benefits.

The insurance giant plans to raise deductibles and premiums for some of its employee health benefits.

“Like many employers in today’s economic environment, we are looking at all aspects of our business,” including benefits, “and making adjustments to ensure we can continue to operate competitively in the future,” wrote Chief Human Resources Officer Randy Brown.

WellPoint’s CEO, Angela Brady, made nearly $10 million in 2008.

WellPoint illegally pressured California employees this summer to fight health care reform, according to Consumer Watchdog. “Regrettably, the congressional legislation, as currently passed by four of the five key committees in Congress, does not meet our definition of responsible and sustainable reform,” said the company’s Anthem Blue Cross unit in a company e-mail. The proposals would hurt the company by “causing tens of millions of Americans to lose their private coverage and end up in a government-run plan.”

A House investigation found that WellPoint also rewarded employees for finding ways to drop policyholders who developed expensive conditions — a practice known as rescission.

Suppose those WellPoint employees might now want to switch to a public option “Medicare for all” health care plan? What goes around comes around.

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/05/wellpoint-cuts-workers-he_n_309716.html

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka on Thursday urged some state insurance commissioners to investigate how the costs of insurers’ lobbying to defeat health-insurance reform are affecting premiums.

“We believe that health insurance providers’ lobbying expenditures have led to excessive rate hikes,” Trumka wrote to regulators in Connecticut, Indiana, New York and Pennsylvania. Laws in those states require insurance regulators to approve rate changes. Two of the four top insurance companies, WellPoint Inc. (WLP) and Cigna Corp. (CI), are based in Indiana and Pennsylvania, respectively.

The AFL-CIO leader also pointed to Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield, which has requested a rate hike of up to 30% in Connecticut while spending more than $9.5 million on lobbying, and UnitedHealth Group Inc. (UNH), which recently proposed a premium increase for its Medicare supplemental insurance while spending more than $2.6 million on lobbying in the first half of 2009.

In addition, Trumka asked regulators to investigate allegations that UnitedHealth and Anthem/WellPoint forced employees to attend meetings intended to pressure them into helping their employers oppose pending health insurance reform legislation.

According to the AFL-CIO – which is supporting the Obama administration’s efforts – premiums for employer-based health insurance more than doubled in the past decade while the health-care industry spent more than $3.5 billion on lobbying.

The health-care industry is the biggest-spending lobbying force in Washington. In the second quarter, health-care players spent $133 million pressing their interests, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. Labor unions and others with a stake in the health-care debate also are lobbying heavily

Insurance companies have been lobbying Congress to defeat the inclusion in health-care reform bills of a “public option” that would provide health insurance at lower costs than is now available. Groups of all stripes are blitzing lawmakers to shape a trillion-dollar health-care overhaul that would reach into every business and home in the country.

If the insurance industry gets the rate increase that would indicate the premium payers will be offsetting the lobbying costs of the health insurance industry. They sure don’t want to pay for the lobbying costs out of their profits.

Max Baucus [VoteSmart] [OpenSecrets] isn’t the only senator who may be taking his health care cues from insurance companies. WellPoint Inc., recently revealed to have influenced Baucus’s health care framework, also has notable ties to Gang of Six Senator Mike Enzi [VoteSmart] [OpenSecrets] (R-Wyo.).

Enzi’s former health policy director between 2003 to 2006, Stephen J. Northrup, is now a registered lobbyist for WellPoint, a subsidiary of insurance giant Blue Cross Blue Shield. [Huffington Post]

Northrup, who has represented numerous health insurance and pharmaceutical companies in the past, is currently “responsible for leading WellPoint’s advocacy efforts before Congress and various federal government agencies,” according to the journal Modern Healthcare.

That’s not all. Blue Cross Blue Shield is currently Enzi’s biggest contributor, according to the Center For Responsive Politics, having provided the Republican senator a total of $38,500 in campaign cash this election cycle. Overall, Enzi has accepted $793,711 from various health care industries since 2005.

Enzi, whose Gang of Six may decide the fate of health care reform, is the only senator to sit on all three committees tasked with drafting the the health care bill — the Finance Committee, Budget Committee and Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (H.E.L.P.) Committee.

While Enzi has advocated for a “bipartisan” solution to health care reform, he has shown more interest in opposing the whole effort. At a town hall in late August, Enzi admitted to obstructing the legislation and has since predicted it will fail.

Senior White House officials have criticized Enzi for his role in trying to defeat the health care legislation, suggesting they may be willing to forgo his support — and bipartisanship in general — to pass a bill.

But it remains unclear how President Obama will proceed as he said in Wednesday’s prime-time speech that he remains committed to working with Republicans to formulate a bipartisan bill, despite accusing them of promulgating “misinformation” and “lies”.

Talk about a conflict of interest! Whose interests is he looking out for? Wellpoint, Blue Cross and Blue Shield, or the people of Wyoming? This all adds to the obvious. Far too many people in Congress are paid for and owned by big Corporate interests. I can’t believe how long it is taking for people to wise up.

Submitted by Wendell Potter on July 1, 2009 – 8:29am. [PR Watch.Org]

I’m hoping President Obama realizes that some of the folks who’ve been currying favor with him are not, as they claim, bringing “solutions” to the health care reform table. Most Americans — especially those who voted for him — want nothing to do with the kind of “reforms” they are peddling.

If you watched the president’s televised Q&A on ABC last Wednesday night, you probably noticed that one of the people in the audience was Ron Williams, the chairman and CEO of Aetna, Inc., the nation’s third largest health insurer, and currently one of the most profitable. But there are a few things that you should know about Williams.

Back in the ’90s, Aetna set out on an acquisition binge in its quest to become the biggest health insurer in the country. It got there by the end of the decade after spending billion of dollars for several competitors. By 1999 it had 21 million health plan members, the most any insurer had ever had at the time.

But, as often happens after buying sprees, Aetna soon came down with a bad case of buyers’ remorse. As it turned out, some of the customers it had paid top price for were not as profitable as Wall Street analysts and the big institutional investors who owned most of Aetna’s stock expected. When they took a closer look at what Aetna had bought, investors started deserting the company in droves. As a result, the company found its stock price in a free fall.

As the Wall Street Journal reported on August 13, 2004, Aetna’s pretax profits as a percentage of revenues began falling dramatically after peaking at about 12 percent in 1998. By 2001 the company was a basket case as far as Wall Street was concerned. It had to do something, and fast.

Probably the most important thing it did to turn itself around was recruit Williams from rival WellPoint, the ambitious for-profit company that was gobbling up Blue Cross and Blue Shield plans from coast to coast.

As the Journal reported, Williams promptly ordered a $20 million revamp of Aetna’s data systems. Health care analyst Joshua Raskin told the Journal that the new system that emerged from that investment, which Aetna dubbed the Executive Management Information System (EMIS for short), was “the single largest driver of the Aetna turnaround.” Why? Because it helped Aetna “identify and dump unprofitable corporate accounts.” How did it do the dumping? By jacking up premiums to unaffordable levels.

By the time the dumping — or purging, as it is frequently called in the industry — was done, Aetna had shed eight million of its 21 million members. It shrank so much that by the time it emerged from the Ron Williams-led turnaround, it had fewer members than when the company started out on its multi-billion dollar buying binge.

While Aetna was shedding those eight million men, women and children, by the way, it also reportedly shed 15,000 of its employees. Wall Street likes it when insurers dump employees, too, because the workers who don’t get the ax have to assume the responsibilities of their laid-off colleagues. That theoretically boosts productivity, which Wall Street likes. And reducing the payroll leaves more money for profits.

The health insurance industry and its allies are working hard right now to convince you that the creation of a public insurance option would put a government bureaucrat between you and your doctor. As the 2004 Wall Street Journal article makes it clear, however, EMIS was at its heart a system that put corporate bureaucrats between people and their doctors. Here’s what it said:

Mr. Williams says EMIS helps him ferret out creeping costs so Aetna can react quickly. Sitting in his first-floor office in Hartford overlooking the Aetna parking lot, he taps on his keyboard to see whether some of the health insurer’s members are visiting emergency rooms too much for nonemergency reasons, such as for the flu or a sprained ankle.

Did that send a chill up your spine like it did mine? And know this, if Aetna’s CEO can keep an eye on your trips to the doctor, so can the CEOs of all the other big insurers.

The insurance industry claims that this time it really and truly supports legislation to reduce the number of people without insurance, that they’ve changed so much since 1994 — when they said the same thing but did everything they could behind the scenes to kill reform — that you can and should believe them now.

The next time you hear someone from the industry talking about how much they are committed to reform, remember that just a few years ago, the CEO of one of the biggest health insurers was the mastermind behind a business strategy that cost thousands of workers their jobs and millions of other people their insurance coverage. That’s the real “solution” the industry is bringing to the table — and the kind of reform Wall Street can really get behind.

Ron Williams has been richly rewarded by Aetna’s board of directors for leading the company back to a level of profitability suitable to Wall Street. They tapped him to succeed Jack Rowe as CEO when Rowe retired in 2006. And they rewarded him with compensation totaling nearly $65 million over the past two years.

(Rowe, by the way, was paid $22.2 million in 2005, his last full year as CEO. He played a big role in hawking the high-deductible plans that Aetna and the other big insurers are now trying to push us all into. He claimed that Americans enrolled in managed care plans have been too sheltered from the real costs of health care and that we need to have more “skin in the game,” by which he meant that we should have to pay a lot more out of our own pockets when we go to the doctor and pick up our prescriptions, even if we have health insurance. The median family income in the United States is just $50,000, which means that most of us already have a lot more skin in the game than Dr. Rowe and Ron Williams will ever need to.)

The insurance industry’s two biggest lobbying groups — America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP) and the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association of America — warned members of Congress in a joint letter a few days ago that the creation of a public insurance option would unravel the country’s employer-based system.

As they say where I come from, that dog won’t hunt.

It is the insurance company executives — in their never-ending quest to meet Wall Street’s profit expectations — who are doing the unraveling by purging employers whose workers have the audacity to file claims when they get sick or injured.

A final point about Ron Williams: Not only are he and his fellow CEOs trying to kill the idea of a public health insurance option — a central part of candidate Obama’s health care proposal — but he is the leading advocate of an idea Obama rejected and which differentiated his proposal from Hillary Clinton‘s — the imposition on all of us of an “individual mandate.” Many insurance executives were wary of such a mandate because they don’t like the government mandating anything, especially those pesky state mandates that force them to include certain benefits in the policies they sell. Advocates of an individual mandate eventually brought the skeptics, including many of AHIP’s board members, around to their way thinking by persuading them that insurers could make billions more in profits if every American had to buy an insurance policy from them. Now you know the real reason behind AHIP’s shift from neutrality on the issue to full-fledged support. It’s all about the money.

With almost 20 years inside the health insurance industry, Wendell Potter saw for-profit insurers hijack our health care system and put profits before patients. Now, he speaks with Bill Moyers about how those companies are standing in the way of health care reform.

Who is Wendell Potter, you ask? Glad you did.

Wendell Potter is former Vice President of corporate communications at CIGNA, one of the United States’ largest health insurance companies. In June 2009 he testified against the HMO industry in the US Senate as a whistleblower.

Potter began his journey towards resigning and becoming a whistleblower in July 2007, when he saw a touring free clinic run by Remote Area Medical in rural Virginia. “What he saw appalled him. Hundreds of desperate people, most without any medical insurance, descended on the clinic from out of the hills. People queued in long lines to have the most basic medical procedures carried out free of charge. Some had driven more than 200 miles from Georgia. Many were treated in the open air. Potter took pictures of patients lying on trolleys on rain-soaked pavements.”

Potter resigned in 2008 and became an active voice on health care reform in 2009 as it became clear to him that the insurance industry and its allies were having a distorting effect on the national debate. Now a fellow at the Center for Media and Democracy, he has appeared in high profile interviews with Bill Moyers and various others.

Go to the PBS site and watch the fascinating video of the interview by Bill Moyers of Wendell Potter or watch it below. Note: it is a 37 minute long video.

Following is a transcript of Moyer’s interview of Wendell Potter. We all owe a great debt of gratitude to Mr. Potter for speaking up. Potter is a former executive of Cigna. I have created links to additional information about people mentioned by Mr. Potter to assist you in keeping it all in perspective.

As I watched it I thought back to the individuals I saw yesterday protesting against healthcare reform. How uninformed they are and so willing protest against something they have little knowledge about and how they have been duped by the insurance industry and the Republican leadership in Congress. Potter explains it all.

I’m satisfied that those opposing protestors will never see the folly of their position. They choose, for a myriad of reasons, to close their eyes to reality. Those protestors probably never read a newspaper or a blog and choose close mindedness. Victims of conservative right wing propaganda. [Read more →]

We now see what has happened to the health-care system. CEOs rake in the big bucks from the huge profits they take in as health-insurance costs have skyrocketed. [Crooks and Liars]

FierceHealthcare reports the following top 10 CEO salaries for 2008.

* Ron Williams – Aetna – Total Compensation: $24,300,112.
* H. Edward Hanway – CIGNA – Total Compensation: $12,236,740.
* Angela Braly – WellPoint – Total Compensation: $9,844,212.
* Dale Wolf – Coventry Health Care – Total Compensation: $9,047,469.
* Michael Neidorff – Centene – Total Compensation: $8,774,483.
* James Carlson – AMERIGROUP – Total Compensation: $5,292,546.
* Michael McCallister – Humana – Total Compensation: $4,764,309.
* Jay Gellert – Health Net – Total Compensation: $4,425,355.
* Richard Barasch – Universal American – Total Compensation: $3,503,702.
* Stephen Hemsley – UnitedHealth Group – Total Compensation: $3,241,042.

Last August 6, when the Congressional recess for the month of August began, a Business Week article by Chad Terhune and Keith Epstein, disclosed that the Health Insurance Industry had already won the healthcare/insurance reformation.

Congress might as well gone on the month’s vacation because it was all over but the shouting. Actually, there was no reason for all those Town Hall Meetings across the nation. There was no “debate” to be had. The Town Hall Meetings were just window dressing. The die had already been cast before the August Congressional recess even begun.

The Business Week article is rather long and I strongly recommend you take the time to read and try to understand it. I will try of highlight extracts from it here to give you an idea how the underbelly of politics works. The subtitle of the article by Terhune and Epstein reads:

How UnitedHealth and rival carriers, maneuvering behind the scenes in Washington, shaped health-care reform for their own benefit [Read more →]

Photo: Mona Shield Payne / Special to the Sun

Demonstrators, who gathered at the intersection of Fort Apache and Russell roads in Las Vegas, want healthcare reform. But Wellpoint, a major critic of a government-run health insurance plan, will have none of it. The company spent $1.22 million on lobbying in the first quarter of 2009.

A spokes person for Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield, a subsidiary of WellPoint said:

“The current market for health insurance is competitive, and a government-run insurance plan would create problems in the marketplace, including…reducing consumer choice by driving insurers out of the market and hurting the ability of private plan initiatives to improve the quality and control costs in the delivery system.”

[Read more →]