by Lee Fang
Earlier this week, the Wall Street Journal reported that AHIP — the multimillion dollar lobbying juggernaut for the health insurance industry — has mobilized 50,000 employees to lobby Congress to defeat the public option. ThinkProgress has learned that AHIP’s grassroots lobbying is being managed by the corporate consulting firm Democracy Data & Communications. DDC has made a name for itself as one of the most effective stealth lobbying firms. Earlier this summer, DDC was caught by reporters using a front group called “Citizens for a Safe Alexandria” to attack the Obama administration for seeking to prosecute Guantanamo Bay prisoners in Alexandria, VA. According to the server-information hub Domaintools.com, the AHIP grassroots outreach website AHIPAdvocacy.org is hosted on a server owned by DDC. Though DDC conceals the hosting of its other websites using a service called DomainsByProxy, ThinkProgress has obtained a list of the domains hosted on DDC servers. A review of this data shows that DDC maintains the grassroots outreach websites for large health insurance companies, but also for big tobacco and Koch Industries: – phillipmorrisusaactioncenter.org (Altria)
– tobaccoissues.com (Altria)
– kochpac.com (Koch Industries)
– aetnavotes.com (Aetna)
– healthactionnetwork.org (WellPoint)
– humanapartners.com (Humana)
– ahipadvocacy.org (AHIP)
DDC is a firm that promises “high impact” outreach programs to not only influence the grassroots, but “change attitudes for the long term.” As the Washington Post explains, DDC pays over 500 contract workers to “spend much of their day telephoning people around the country and asking them to sign letters to Congress that press for legislation.” The firm helped orchestrate “grassroots” support for President Bush’s push to privatize Social Security, and helped manage online efforts for the right-wing attack group Freedom’s Watch. DDC is headed by B.R. McConnon, a former associate of Jack Abramoff’s lobbying partners, and a former employee of the Koch-funded astroturf organization known as Citizens for a Sound Economy. Citizens for a Sound Economy — which has also received funds from private health insurers in the past and played a critical astroturf role in killing reform under Clinton — eventually split, with one wing forming Americans for Prosperity in 2003, and another forming FreedomWorks in 2004. Both organizations, which are still funded by the Koch Industries empire, were instrumental in organizing the anti-Obama tea party protests, and have been spreading misinformation and anger at the current health reform effort. Americans for Prosperity’s anti-health reform front group, Patients United, has hosted speakers comparing the House health reform bill to the Holocaust. Curiously, DDC servers also host anti-health reform letters from the Chamber of Commerce and Rep. Charles Boustany (R-LA), as well as continual news updates about the reform debate. All three documents are under a subsection titled WellPoint. Given the stealthy nature of astroturf lobbying firms, it is difficult to discern the extent to which DDC is managing AHIP’s efforts. UnitedHealth, another large insurer, was caught recently using a call center to direct people to a radical tea party anti-health reform protest outside of the offices of Rep. Zach Space (D-OH). Already, the health insurance industry has flexed its muscle to water down reform. After spending millions on lobbying, advertising, and direct contributions to lawmakers, the Senate Finance Committee made a major concession allowing insurers to reimburse only 65% of medical bills (down from the 76% proposed requirement). And indeed, although AHIP has made grandiose promises of self regulation, many insurers have recently broke promises made by AHIP President Karen Ignagni. On June 16, despite Ignagni’s pledges of commitment, insurance executives from UnitedHealth Group, Assurant, and WellPoint specifically refused to “commit” to ending the controversial practice of rescinding coverage after an applicant files a medical claim. With DDC’s stealth lobbying assistance, AHIP may well kill the public option too.
Source: AlterNet
The insurance industry is facing new heat from House Democrats as Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio), chairman of the Oversight and Government Reform subcommittee on Domestic Policy, on Wednesday requested that six top insurance company executives appear before his panel to explain how they do business.
Kucinich in his letter said the Sept. 17 hearing will examine “the nature, cost/benefit, and impact of administrative measures and protocols used by the health insurance industry to determine coverage for doctor-prescribed health care treatments, as well as costs of administrative measures undertaken by doctors to interface with insurance companies.”
The missive went to CEOs of Aetna, WellPoint, Cigna, Humana, Hemingway Health Care and UnitedHealth. It follows a request earlier this month that Energy and Commerce Chairman Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.), chairman of that panel’s Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, sent to 52 insurance companies requesting reams of potentially embarrassing financial information. Waxman and Stupak are seeking details of executive compensation packages, conferences and retreats they sponsored, and the profitability of their products. Read it all at Roll Call
Not only is Obama clearly ready to throw the public option overboard, he is embracing the requirement that we all be forced to buy insurance from private insurers. That means your tax dollars and mine will be used to pay subsidies to the big insurers to provide coverage to people who can't afford to buy their policies, because the big insurers charge far more than they should because Wall Street investors demand that they do.
One of the people who undoubtedly talked Obama away from the public option and into supporting this mandate is his new BFF, Aetna CEO Ron Williams. Williams, who made $65 million off of Aetna's policyholders' premiums over the past two years and who was the mastermind behind Aetna's shedding of eight million members a few years ago to meet Wall Street's demands, is the insurance industry's leading champion of requiring us all to buy insurance. And, of course, without a public option, we'll all be forced to buy coverage from Aetna or one of the other private insurers.
According to a recent article in Forbes, Williams has been to the White House a half a dozen times recently to advise the president and his staff on health care reform. That same article quoted a Wall Street analyst as saying that Aetna likely will dump about 600,000 policyholders during the coming months to satisfy its investors' unrelenting profit demands.
During his speech in Montana, Obama talked a lot of trash about the insurance industry. Don't be fooled by that tough talk. It's all part of a strategy to try get us to believe we'll get the reform he promised during the campaign. Industry leaders are in fact delighted he's denouncing their behavior, because they believe most of his supporters -- who were hopeful the stars might finally have aligned for real reform -- will be fooled into thinking the reform bill that reaches his desk will benefit them more than the special interests with their armies of lobbyists. And they know the nonprofit cooperatives Sebelius and Gibbs are now trying to sell us on don't have a prayer of succeeding. The big for-profits will never let them get off the ground in any meaningful way.
Sadly, I believe the fat cats are winning and that the bill Congress sends the president will be one that gives an industry with an unsustainable business model a new lease on life and a guarantee of unprecedented future profits.
So I hope the president's aides are buying lots of lipstick. He'll need all he can get to put on that pig of a bill.
Source: Crooks and Liars
I confess: I was not an early supporter of a public option for health insurance. This is because I believed that our existing system could be reshaped to work for the good with some reforms, some regulations, and some transparency.
In my defense, I have worked in employee benefits for nearly 30 years, and have some working knowledge of the types of reforms that could actually work. But they won’t. The reason is simple enough: the culture of the insurance industry works against the good of the insured and toward the good of the company’s shareholders. Health insurance cannot be a for-profit enterprise. Period. It must be a not-for-profit enterprise, and that means all facets: pharmacy, hospital, diagnostic, imaging, etc. As soon as profits are the primary motivator, patients become the problem. When patients become the problem, attention is only paid to ways to make them less of a problem, either by cutting back what is insured, how much is insured, or by raising their rates to unaffordable extremes. Right now, all three of these options are in play.
This is truly critical. A recent study indicates that 19 percent of companies want to stop offering insurance over the next 3-5 years. If they do, we will be at the precipice of a complete collapse of our economy as health care costs continue to take a larger bite out of our income.
Yet, Aetna has no concern for this. They serve only one master, the bottom line. This is at the heart of why markets are ineffective and inefficient ways to keep health care costs down. There is a fundamental conflict between the need to serve a profit on every quarterly statement and the requirement to provide benefits to the policyholders who pay the premiums that pay the claims and the profit. This is a crisis that won’t be eased by tweaking a badly-broken and dysfunctional system. The entire system that must be reshaped into a single payer system and coverage for all. It is a system that must put health at the front of all considerations rather than profits. Read More
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