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.
Stupak, and the Energy and Commerce Committee chairman, Henry Waxman, D-California, did their job. Why didn't the media do its? Why were the outrages uncovered by Stupak and Waxman un-covered by most of the media?
Maybe because the Obama White House drew the spotlight away from health care. They'd diverted the media to cover Obama's proposed reforms of the financial regulatory system.
Clinton gave his health care address to the Congress on September 23, 1993. October was supposed to be "Health Care Month" in the White House, but so many other issues got in the way that he had just one public event focused on health care in the entire month -- just one.
I understand that Obama's White House team has to juggle a lot of issues; I've been there. And I'm sure the Obama financial reforms have merit. But if the president wants to pass his ambitious health care reform, he's going to have to put other, worthy, ideas on the back burner and shine the media spotlight on the plight of people like Robin Beaton.
Over the past five years, almost 20,000 individual insurance policyholders have had their policies rescinded by the three insurance companies who testified today: Assurant, UnitedHealth Group, and WellPoint.
At a long-awaited House subcommittee hearing on Wednesday, health-care professionals made it clear that they believe a single-payer system to be the best and perhaps only workable option for health care reform.
"Single-payer is the only reform that can control health care costs," said Walter Tsou, a University of Pennsylvania professor and an adviser to Physicians for a National Health Program. The last 50 years of government policy have protected insurance industry profits at the expense of taxpayers, doctors and hospitals, he said.
The discussion about a single-payer approach has been slow in coming because congressional leaders and the White House took a single-payer system off the table early in talks on health care reform. But there are signs that they regret that decision now.
"The reason our health care system is in such trouble is that it's set up to generate profits, not to provide care," Angell said, noting that private insurers spend 20 percent on marketing and administrative costs, compared with 3 percent for Medicare. She deemed the health-insurance sector "an industry that offers almost nothing of value."
Most of the panelists dismissed concerns of job losses at private insurers, arguing that employment would increase overall given the increased demand for medical professionals. Jenkins estimated total job creation at 2.6 million.
Andrews and full committee chair Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.) are scheduled to discuss a single-payer system with the House Ways and Means Committee later Wednesday, and the subcommittee chair noted the presence of Ways and Means member Pete Stark at the hearing. "This is the beginning of the process, not the end," Andrews said.
The House will release healthcare legislation very soon, and the draft bill could even come out next week. From there the bill will go to Energy and Commerce, Education and Labor, and the Ways and Means committees for debate.
We need you to call, fax, or visit four Congresssperson’s offices ASAP to make sure that single-payer healthcare is included in these discussions.
FIRST - Ask Your Rep. to Attend the Healthcare Financing Briefing
The Leadership Conference for Guaranteed Health Care is holding a briefing titled, "How Do We Pay For It? Options for Financing Expanded Health Care."
Call your representative and ask him/her to attend. If you know your representative, call 866-338-1015 for the Capital Switchboard. If not, visit votesmart.org to find out.
Here’s the information: 1:00 PM, June 10, 2009 2237 Rayburn House Office Building Washington, DC
SECOND - Ask Two Chairmen to Hold Single-Payer Hearings Please call the chairmen of these committees and tell them that: “Because the majority of Americans, doctors, and nurses support a single-payer healthcare system, I hope to see a robust debate on single-payer healthcare–with single-payer advocates as witnesses. Please follow Rep. George Miller’s lead and hold hearings on single-payer healthcare in your committee.”
Call or fax the Committee Chairmen here: Energy and Commerce Chairman Rep. Henry Waxman Phone: 202-225-3976 - Fax: 202-225-4099
Ways and Means Chairman Rep. Charles Rangel Phone: 202-225-4365 - Fax: 202-225-0816
Sen. Ted Kennedy (MA) is holding a hearing on healthcare reform this Thursday, June 11th, at 3pm in Senate HELP Committee. Please call or fax him asking him to include single-payer advocates in this important hearing.
Sen. Ted Kennedy Phone: 202-224-4543 - Fax: 202-224-2417 - Email: here
The Health, Employment, Labor, and Pensions Subcommittee of the House Education and Labor Committee will hold a hearing titled “Examining the Single Payer Health Care Option” on Wednesday, June 10th at 10:30am in 2175 Rayburn House Office Building.
Contact C-SPAN and let them know we would like them to carry it. C-SPAN's Main Number is: (202) 737-3220.
U.S. Rep. George Miller (CA-7) chairs the subcommittee that will be conducting the hearing and is a co-sponsor of HR 676, "Expanded and Improved Medicare for All." On 6/2/09, another co-sponsor was added--Marcia Fudge (OH-11)--to bring us up to 78 co-sponsors.
Please contact your U.S. Rep., tell them you are a single-payer supporter, and let them know you want them to attend this hearing. The toll-free number for the Capitol switchboard is 1-866-220-0044.
If you don't know who your U.S. Rep. is, go to www.congress.org to find out.
For those of you who would like to attend in person and can make the trip to D.C., hearings are open to the public. Just make sure you get there early, so you get a seat.
At the start of a Senate Finance Committee hearing on health care reform, single payer activists stand up to ask why single payer is not being represented during this hearing. My gratitude goes out to those brave men and women.
The Senate Finance Committee, led by Sen. Max Baucus, is holding important roundtable discussions on health care on May 5 and May 14. The list of witnesses includes Blue Cross Blue Shield and the private insurance lobby group America's Health Insurance Plans but not one single-payer supporter.
We need to tell Congress that this is unacceptable.
David Himmelstein, Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard University, testifies at a hearing investigating ways to reduce the cost of health insurance for employers, employees and their families on April 23, 2009.
The definitive legislation on health care reform that will be supported by the Democratic leadership in Congress has not yet been written. This important testimony by PNHP’s David Himmelstein confirms that single payer reform is still in play, in spite of dismissive comments by many of those involved.
Instead of sitting back and observing the process, it is imperative that we intensify our efforts to deliver the single payer message. The physical and financial health of the people of our nation depend on it.
Transcript of Dr. Himmelstein's testimony:
Health, Employment, Labor, and Pensions Subcommittee Hearing United States House of Representatives Committee on Education and Labor April 23, 2009
Mr. Chairman, members of the Committee. My name is David Himmelstein. I am a primary care doctor in Cambridge, Massachusetts and Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard. I also serve as National Spokesperson for Physicians for a National Health Program. Our 15,000 physician members support non-profit, single payer national health insurance because of overwhelming evidence that lesser reforms will fail.
Health reform must address the cost crisis for insured as well as uninsured Americans. My research group found that illness and medical bills caused about half of all personal bankruptcies in 2001, and even more than that in 2007. Strikingly, three quarters of the medically bankrupt were insured. But their coverage was too skimpy to protect them from financial collapse.
A single payer reform would make care affordable through vast savings on bureaucracy and profits. As my colleagues and I have shown in research published in the New England Journal of Medicine, administration consumes 31% of health spending in the U.S., nearly double what Canada spends. In other words, if we cut our bureaucratic costs to Canadian levels, we’d save nearly $400 billion annually — more than enough to cover the uninsured and to eliminate copayments and deductibles for all Americans. By simplifying its payment system Canada has cut insurance overhead to 1% of premiums — one twentieth of Aetna’s overhead - and eliminated mounds of expensive paperwork for doctors and hospitals. In fact, while cutting insurance overhead could save us $131 billion annually, our insurers waste much more than that because of the useless paperwork they inflict on doctors and hospitals.
A Canadian hospital gets paid like a fire department does in the U.S. It negotiates a global budget with the single insurance plan in its province, and gets one check each month that covers virtually all costs. They don’t have to bill for each bandaid and aspirin tablet. At my hospital, we know our budget on January 1, but we collect it piecemeal in fights with hundreds of insurers over thousands of bills each day. The result is that hundreds of people work for Mass General’s billing department, while Toronto General employs only a handful — mostly to send bills to Americans who wander across the border. Altogether, U.S. hospitals could save about $120 billion annually on bureaucracy under a single payer system.
And doctors in the U.S. waste about $95 billion each year fighting with insurance companies and filling out useless paperwork.
Unfortunately, these massive potential savings on bureaucracy can only be achieved through a single payer reform. A health reform plan that includes a public plan option might realize some savings on insurance overhead. However, as long as multiple private plans coexist with the public plan, hospitals and doctors would have to maintain their costly billing and internal cost tracking apparatus. Indeed, my colleagues and I estimate that even if half of all privately insured Americans switched to a public plan with overhead at Medicare’s level, the administrative savings would amount to only 9% of the savings under single payer.
While administrative savings from a reform that includes a Medicare-like public plan option are modest, at least they’re real. In contrast, other widely touted cost control measures are completely illusory. A raft of studies shows that prevention saves lives, but usually costs money. The recently-completed Medicare demonstration project found no cost savings from chronic disease management programs. And the claim that computers will save money is based on pure conjecture. Indeed, in a study of 3000 U.S. hospitals that my colleagues and I have recently completed, the most computerized hospitals had, if anything, slightly higher costs.
My home state of Massachusetts recent experience with health reform illustrates the dangers of believing overly optimistic cost control claims. Before its passage, the reform’s backers made many of the same claims for savings that we’re hearing today in Washington. Prevention, disease management, computers, and a health insurance exchange were supposed to make reform affordable. Instead, costs have skyrocketed, rising 23% between 2005 and 2007, and the insurance exchange adds 4% for its own administrative costs on top of the already high overhead charged by private insurers. As a result, one in five Massachusetts residents went without care last year because they couldn’t afford it. Hundreds of thousands remain uninsured, and the state has drained money from safety net hospitals and clinics to kept the reform afloat.
In sum, a single payer reform would make universal, comprehensive coverage affordable by diverting hundreds of billions of dollars from bureaucracy to patient care. Lesser reforms — even those that include a public plan option — cannot realize such savings. While reforms that maintain a major role for private insurers may be politically attractive, they are economically and medically nonsensical.
Sen. Max Baucus, Chair of the Senate Finance Committee, and Sen. Chuck Grassley, Ranking Member of the same, have put together an ambitious schedule dedicated to producing a health care reform bill by the summer. Their next wave of roundtable discussions is set to begin April 21.
Curiously, despite the fact that the VA has shown far more success managing patients with chronic diseases and comparative effectiveness research, as well as Health IT, no one from the VA will be present. No one representing coordinated care – not even from the Mayo Clinic. No one to talk about the medical home. No patient advocates. Only one “activist” group in the National Partnership for Women and Families (a great advocacy group, but hardly the first name you think of in the health care reform community.)
However in the group of 12 invited participants, there will be 4 (FOUR!) individuals working for the insurance industry in some form or fashion.
There’s Dr. Allan M. Korn, Chief Medical Office for the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association. There’s Roy Williams, CEO of Aetna. There’s Glenn Hackbarth, who is currently chair of MedPac, the payment advisory committee tasked with analyzing cost and quality of care in Medicare. What prepared Mr. Hackbrath for being able to advise Medicare on, say, how much we should pay the private plans that make up Medicare Advantage? How about some time as an executive for Harvard Community Health Plan? There’s also Dr. Glenn Steele, also with a background as a surgeon, who’s president of the Geisinger Health System in Danville, PA, a network of provider physicians and hospitals, complete with … yes, surprise, the Geisinger Health Plan, selling HMO and PPO products since the 1970s.
ACTION ITEM: Write to Baucus and Grassley and demand a fair debate and a fair balance of speakers as they work towards universal health care. Make sure they know we are paying attention. Tell them that their job is to help create a plan that best help American Citizens, not the insurance industry. And I hope you will add that you really want to have a spokesperson for single payer at the table.
The Senate Finance Committee, led by Sen. Max Baucus, is holding important roundtable discussions on health care on 
