As expected, Dems are pushing hard for something to show the voters. Too bad they didn't just drop the Medicare age, but oh well:
Democrats are pushing Senate leaders and the White House to speed up key benefits in the health reform bill to 2010, eager to give the party something to show taxpayers for their $900 billion investment in an election year.
The most significant changes to the health care system wouldn’t kick in until 2013 — two election cycles away. With Republicans expected to make next year a referendum on health care reform, Democrats are quietly lobbying to push up the effective dates on popular programs, so they'll have something to run on in the congressional midterm elections.
Democrats are anxious to mix the good with the bad since some of the pain would be phased in early, including more than $100 billion in industry fees that critics say could be passed on to consumers.
“We want to be able, within the cost framework and the implementation framework, to have as much start as early as possible, even though we know all of it can’t,” said Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.), a Finance Committee member who is working with other senators on the effort. “And the White House wants to have as much as possible to start.”
Under the Democratic wish list, senior citizens would receive discounts on brand-name drugs next year. Small businesses that provide insurance would see tax credits. And a $5 billion high-risk pool would cover people with preexisting conditions.
Democratic strategists expect the 2010 election to present a stark contrast between the parties, particularly if the health care bill receives minimal Republicans support. The front-load strategy could help blunt GOP attacks on the bill as a toxic mix of higher taxes, rising premiums and cuts to Medicare.
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Chuck Schumer talks to Rachel's fill in Alison Stewart about what the next steps are as negotiations continue on what's in the final version of the health care bill. As Schumer explains, what happens next is in Harry Reid's hands.
Stewart: You called the bill you voted on today “Not ideal but a good bill”. Despite your best efforts the public option was not part of it. Why not?
Schumer: Well, we didn’t have the votes obviously but we are making good progress once again. We never thought we’d win in the Finance Committee but thirty Democrats have signed a letter saying the public option must be in the combined bill. There are many others who are supportive. The four of us in the leadership didn’t sign the letter because they were to the leadership. We’re for it as well and I am very optimistic that we’re going go get a strong public option.
The House is standing firm on public option and I think all of those when they saw the vote in the Finance Committee who thought “Oh it’s over” hadn’t really read the situation correctly.
Stewart: Well, how do you get it done? How does it end up in the final bill?
Schumer: Well, first Leader Reid has the option of putting it in the final bill. If he puts it in the final bill, in the combined bill then you would need sixty votes to remove it and there clearly are not sixty votes against the public option. If… and so we’re urging him to do that and he’s seriously considering it.
Once it passes the Senate if that were to happen, it’s in the House Bill, it’s in the Senate bill and it would have to be in the final product. So it’s very important to see if a public option is in the bill that Leader Reid puts together. He hasn’t yet made up his mind, but many of us who believe in the public option are urging him to do so and so far we’re getting, we’re getting heard.
Louisville, Ky.: Ezra, can you shed some light on the process involved in moving the Health-Care bill through the Senate? I've heard bits and pieces about number of votes required, but would like some clarification about: voting to block filibuster in the Senate, taking the bill back to a joint Senate-House conference, then back to the floor for final vote. Would you expand on this? Thanks.
Ezra Klein: Sure. Next move is the Finance Committee vote on Tuesday: that requires a bare majority of the committee (I think that means 11 votes, but that's just memory). Then Reid and the Democratic leadership blend the HELP and Finance bills into one bill. That doesn't require any votes. Then the bill comes to the floor. It'll need 60 votes against a filibuster, and 51 votes in favor of the legislation.
Then we have to deal with the House bills. Do you have a headache? People are becoming very irritable in America. Haven't you noticed? The health-care debate and the economic situation is really, really making life miserable for most of America.
A kiss for luck and we're on our way...
Before the rising sun we fly...
So many roads to choose...
We start out walking and learn to run...
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Rachel Maddow highlighted our Blue America ad which calls out Blanche Lincoln over her stance on the public option.
A Bad Day to Oppose Health Reform
Rachel Maddow: And of course there has been a barrage of ads taken out by progressive groups targeting conservative and potentially vulnerable Democrats like Senator Blanche Lincoln and Congressman Mike Ross both of Arkansas both of who have said they oppose a public health insurance option. A brand new ad produced by the political action committee Blue America just started running last night.
...Ad: We can barely pay our bills and Blanche Lincoln is worried about the insurance companies?...
Maddow: This is what a full court press for health reform looks like. And the terrible, no good, very bad day for the anti-health reform forces today is what it looks when a full court press is working.
There is a full-court press going on and I want to thank the blogosphere for not sitting back and letting Conservadems dictate the terms of the debate.
We don't know what Lincoln's going to do. She, along with Conrad and Baucus, are the only Democrats to vote against all forms of the PO in the Finance Committee. It's hard to imagine that she's going to vote for a plan that contains one on the floor. But there is no reason that she shouldn't allow her party to have an up or down vote even if she votes no in the end. It's all about cloture at this point and we need to keep the pressure on.
Arkansas' Blanche Lambert Lincoln trails all four of her leading Republican challengers in the first Rasmussen Reports Election 2010 survey in the state.
Lincoln fails to get 50% of the vote in any of the match-ups, and any incumbent who falls short of that level is considered vulnerable.
Ho hum! Another Monday, another story of official indifference to the lack of affordable health care. In the words of Barney Frank: On what planet do these people live?
The affordability question vexing Democrats is whether those with moderate income will be able to afford health insurance, even with the subsidies the legislation would provide and all sorts of new rules aimed at controlling costs.
Because the legislation would require nearly all Americans to obtain health insurance, affordability is a potentially serious political issue. That is particularly so because most people would incur a financial penalty — payable along with income taxes — if they did not obtain coverage.
Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, the senior Republican on the Finance Committee, last week attacked the requirement to have insurance, the so-called individual mandate, as potentially imposing a crippling penalty of $1,500 on a family earning as little as $25,000 a year.
“It’s a pretty heavy burden for low-income families,” Mr. Grassley said in committee debate.
You know it's bad when Chuck Grassley is the voice of the working poor.
Some liberal Democrats are already suggesting that the legislation may not be worth adopting if it will end up forcing Americans to buy health coverage they really cannot afford.
“I am sympathetic, and I understand the concerns, and I appreciate as well the political volatility around the question of mandating or requiring coverage,” said Senator Debbie Stabenow, Democrat of Michigan, who is also on the finance panel. “The big question we have all grappled with is how do you make sure everybody is in, and that’s a tough one. It comes down to whether or not ultimately in this bill we can say this is affordable for people.”
Well, Debbie, I'd say the big question is: Who benefits? I don't doubt your sincerity, but I don't think everyone on the committee sees it the same way you so. Ultimately, is this a billion-dollar giveaway to insurance companies, a balm to the massive egos on the Senate Finance committee, or an actual solution to a very serious problem - namely, lack of affordable health care? I'm guessing the last is not all that important to the boys of the Senate Millionaires Club.
There are two obvious ways of making coverage more affordable, and neither is workable.
One would be to sharply reduce the cost of health care across the board, thereby limiting the cost of insurance. This is a chief aim of the Democrats’ bill, but it would require sweeping improvements in efficiency, including higher-quality, lower-cost treatment and better use of technology — all goals of the legislation, but not about to happen anytime soon.
The other obvious way would be to sharply increase government subsidies to help middle-class people buy insurance. Ms. Stabenow, for instance, has proposed capping the amount moderate-income Americans would have to pay for insurance premiums at 6.5 percent of income, with the subsidies paying the balance. The legislation now sets that cap on premium costs at 12 percent.
But President Obama has already sealed the top of the affordability box, telling everyone in his speech to Congress on Sept. 9 that he will not accept a health care bill that costs more than $900 billion over 10 years. And subsidies are already the biggest-ticket item.
Because after all, maintaining all those wars is expensive! Gotta prioritize here!
Some top White House officials, however, see a third way, a potential escape hatch: exempting more families and individuals on the basis of income from the penalty for failing to buy insurance, a fine that for families could run as high as $1,900.
The bill proposed by Senator Max Baucus of Montana, the Finance Committee chairman, would waive the penalty if the cheapest insurance, even with subsidies, would cost 10 percent of a family’s income.
Lowering the waiver threshold to 5 percent of income is a risky move, because limiting the threat of a penalty could leave more people uninsured, undermining a main point of the legislation.
Oh, come on. We all know the point of the current legislation as it stands. It's to put 40 million new victims on the insurance company rolls, thus ensuring massive quantities of campaign cash in the bank accounts of the cooperative politicians.
The Congressional Budget Office estimates that while there would be 29 million fewer uninsured people as a result of the legislation, a separate 25 million people would still be uninsured in 2019 — about one-third of them illegal immigrants.
Sparing more people from the penalty would certainly increase the projected number of uninsured, by tempting more people, particularly younger Americans, to continue going without insurance. But White House officials think the number of people willing to risk going uninsured would not rise by much, perhaps two million people. The budget office has not issued projections yet, and some Democrats warned that the erosion could be much worse.
Oh well! What's another two million college students who can't afford a doctor when they get the swine flu - a disease that has disproportionately fatal results in their age bracket?
And in the end, that may be the smallest price to pay to avert what could be a devastating political argument against the Democrats’ plan: that working-class Americans would be penalized heavily for not buying insurance they say they cannot afford.
Think of how amoral that argument is. People aren't really human, they're merely chips to be used in a high-stakes political poker game. Nice 'hope and change' there, President Obama.
Since the Senate is the group turning the health care debate into "either-or" - as in, "either" regular citizens get screwed "or" the health-for-profit industry gets screwed, I thought I'd point this out as a perfect example of how they think:
The Finance Committee seemed to come very close to passing an amendment Tuesday that would have violated the White House deal with the pharmaceutical industry.
Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) proposed ending what some Democrats have called a windfall for the pharmaceutical industry – and he picked up strong support from his party.
But two sources familiar with the process say it is still likely to fall short when the committee votes Wednesday.
As part of the 2003 Medicare prescription drug program, more than 6 million low-income seniors were shifted from Medicaid, which allowed the government to negotiate a deep discount for drugs, to the Medicare program, which did not. This has resulted in the government paying about 30 percent more for drugs, according to an analysis by Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Fla.).
Nelson’s amendment would shift these beneficiaries back to the Medicaid program, resulting in $86 billion in savings that could be used to close the donut hole for senior citizens.
Senators were drawn into a tense discussion over the merits of the White House’s $80 billion deal with the pharmaceutical industry, and the failings, as some Democrats see it, of the Medicare prescription drug program.
Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.) said the Finance Committee should honor the deal with the drug industry. To suddenly double their obligation from $80 billion to more than $160 billion would not be “fair,” he said.
Now, think about that. Senior citizens are not getting needed medication because it's too expensive, but it's more important to continue giving pharmaceutical companies this windfall because they're counting on it and it wouldn't be "fair" to take it away from them.
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Keith Olbermann talks to Sen. Jay Rockefeller about the foot dragging by the Republicans during the amendment process on the health care bill. Rockfeller still intends to try to have a public option included in the final bill. When Keith said it didn't appear that they have the votes to get it passed, Rockeller said "nothing is impossible, and that particularly includes the public option".
I just got off a conference call with Sens. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Jay Rockefeller (D-WV). They are confident -- very confident -- that health care reform will include a public option.
"The health care bill that is signed into law by the President will have a good, strong, robust public option," Schumer said.
How that will happen remains an open question. But the Senators assured reporters on the call that we're all going to get a taste of their passion and persuasiveness on this issue at the ongoing Senate Finance Committee hearings on Friday.
"I think it's a great idea," Rockefeller said of the public option. "Chuck Schumer thinks it's a great idea. And we're going to be all over it tomorrow."
Schumer said there will be a "full-blown debate" and that "even though the public option might be the underdog in the Senate Finance Committee, don't count it out."
"Tomorrow is the opening day in our big fight," he said.
Reporters tried to press on how, exactly, a public option would make its way out of the Senate Finance Committee, let alone make it to the President's desk. Will a public option amendment be tacked onto the Baucus bill? Will it be added on the Senate floor? How many votes do the Democrats have on a public health insurance option? Will they try to pass it through a 51-Senator reconciliation vote?
Rockefeller responded to TPM's question by saying "I think we have a good shot of getting it out of the Finance Committee."
He continued: "Don't rule it out. Don't fall victim to this feeling that it's not going to happen."
Chuck Schumer appeared on The Rachel Maddow Show and added this:
Schumer: Well tomorrow is really the first day of the fight. It won't be the last. We are going to offer Sen. Rockefeller and myself, two public option amendments and have the Finance Committee vote. Your viewers should know that this is the beginning of the fight because the Finance Committee is more conservative than the Senate as a whole. The Finance Democrats tend to come from rural and redder states. We'll then move to the floor of the Senate where the public option has a better chance than in the Finance Committee and then we'll move to Conference Committee with the House where it has a better chance still because the House has been very strong.
And my prediction is that at the end of the day we will have some form of public option, and a good form of public option in the final bill. Tomorrow's fight to be honest with you is uphill given the membership of the Finance Committee but we want to start the debate because the more the public hears what the public option really is the more they like it.
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So Senate Democrats on the Finance Committee offered an amendment that would enable the federal government to bargain for lower drug prices for their bulk purchasing, a direct assault on the White House/Big Pharma deal from a few months back. Basically it would shift poor seniors back onto Medicaid for their drug purchasing, where the government can negotiate discounts. This would save the government over $80 billion dollars.
I was not involved in negotiations with PhRMA but I believe that the administration was, obviously PhRMA was, and I presume this committee was involved in some way in those negotiations.
And what PhRMA agreed to do through those negotiations is to pay about
80 billion dollars over 10 years to help fill up half the donut hole. That's my understanding. And they are prepared to go forward and to honor that commitment. As I understand it, the commitment from our colleague Senator Nelson would basically double what was negotiated with PhRMA.
And whether you like PhRMA or not -- remember I talked earlier today in our opening statements, I talked about four core values, and one of those is the golden rule, treat other people the way I want to be treated?
I'll tell you -- if someone negotiated a deal with me and I agreed to put up say, 80 dollars or 80 million dollars or 80 billion dollars and then you came back and said to me a couple of weeks later -- no no, I know you agreed to do 80 billion and I know you were willing to help support through an advertising campaign this particular -- not even this particular bill, just the idea of generic health care reform? No, we're going to double -- we're going to double what you agreed in those negotiations to do. That's not the way -- that's not what I consider treating people the way I'd want to be treated.
That just doesn't seem right to me.
This is incredible. The deal is transparently one to protect drug industry profits. There's just no doubt about this. Carper is saying that it's more important to get a few generic ads in support of health care reform than to save the US taxpayers $80 billion dollars. Backroom deals must be honored even if they hurt people. That's the "golden rule" in Washington.
Did Carper not know that cameras were rolling when he said this?
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Here's some of the latest on health-care reform. First, Max Baucus released the Senate Finance Committee's version of health-care reform. Such as it is.
Max Baucus will release the Chairman's Mark -- the official first draft of his bill -- later today. But things are not going according to plan. He's got a bill full of the compromises meant to attract Republican support, but no Republican support. Not even Olympia Snowe, at this point, has committed to backing the bill.
Meanwhile, the framework has conceded enough to the GOP that it's also losing Democratic support, including that of Jay Rockefeller, chairman of the Finance Committee's Health Care Subcommittee. And Rockefeller says that four to six Democrats on the committee feel similarly. Baucus is thus caught between a rock and a hard place. The absence of any Republican support makes it hard for him to justify his compromises. And his compromises make it hard for the Democrats on the committee to support his bill.
Nate Silver checks in with objections from the Senate Finance Committee:
Firstly, there's Jay Rockefeller, who opposes the lack of a pubic option.
Ron Wyden doesn't think the subsidies are sufficient.
Then there's Olympia Snowe, who doesn't like the funding mechanism.
John Kerry also has issues with the funding plan -- different issues than Snowe does -- and implies that the bill needs significant changes.
Mike Enzi and Chuck Grassley, who were never really on board in the first place, have a litany of objections.
Kent Conrad now wants the CBO to score the bill with a 20-year time window -- an unorthodox move which could have a variety of motives, but if nothing else introduces another wrench into the works.
These are not just any old random set of Senators opposing Baucus's plan -- these are the thought leaders on health care reform.
Negotiations are funny things. Sometimes the scariest moments come when you're closest to a settlement, as all sides feel emboldened to take the last opportunity to demonstrate resolve. Leverage in a negotiation is not necessarily a zero-sum affair, since nobody has any leverage if there's no hope to reach an agreement. So some of this maneuvering, perhaps, is a reflection of the bill moving closer to passage and not further away.
But let's be clear -- some of this is Baucus's chickens coming home to roost. When you make a unilateral decision to negotiate with only five other people from a 23-person committee and 100-person Senate, and two of those five people have clear electoral disincentives against supporting any plan that you might come up with, the negotiations are liable to end in failure far more often than not. The flurry of on-the-record statements against Baucus's reform plans -- not "leaks", not trial balloons -- points toward a defective process.
And that may suit Democrats just fine. There are at least three other starting points for a final showdown over health care: the House Tri-Committee bill, the Senate HELP bill, and possibly also the White's House's statement of principles, some of which remain vaguely defined. Many of the objections raised to BaucusCare would necessarily apply to one or more of those bills too -- but they'd appear to be starting from no worse a position than Baucus's plan itself.
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All day I've been hearing how stupid Max Baucus was to release his plan this week which is basically the same bill he leaked back in June. Chuck Todd was wondering why he took so long to produce nothing new. Suddenly the lead Baucus Dogs' bill isn't the be all and end all.
Todd and Andrea Mitchell were saying that Baucus still has a role, but he screwed up by taking so long. He lost his leverage. We'll see, but it was fascinating watching the media turn on the the king of the gang of six.
Max Baucus' plan had the name of Liz Fowler, a former WellPoint VP who now works for the Finance Committee, in the metadata. When you have WellPoint personnel instrumental in writing the laws, you get little provisions like this:
Interstate Sale of Insurance. Starting in 2015, states may form “health care choice compacts” to allow for the purchase of non-group health insurance across state lines. Such compacts may exist between two or more states. Once compacts have been formed, insurers would be allowed to sell policies in any state participating in the compact. Insurers selling policies through a compact would only be subject to the laws and regulations of the state where the policy is written or issued.
This is something that conservatives have been begging to do for years. Even the most outgunned conservative on a talking head debate can vomit up "let people take their insurance across state lines to increase competition!" It sounds reasonable. But there's a very good reason why it would quickly turn into a nightmare, and you can see it in the examples of Delaware and South Dakota.
{} Consumer Watchdog jumped on this today, claiming that this race to the bottom could be expanded...read on
Max Baucus is getting serious. Just a few hours before President Obama is scheduled to address a joint session of Congress, the Finance Committee chairman announced that the committee would be moving forward with a health care reform bill - with or without the GOP.
The announcement followed a morning meeting with the so-called Gang of Six. A source with knowledge of the situation said that Baucus told the two other Democrats and three Republicans that he will be putting out a "Chairman's Mark" by the middle of next week whether he has Republican support or not. (A Chairman's Mark is a bill written by the chairman of the committee.)
It’s obvious that people who show up screaming about how they want the government out of their Medicare and who go into a faint because they heard that the health care bill has no provision to ban abortion aren’t people that you can respond to in any way. They can’t compromise or understand the concept. They’re too busy struggling against reality itself.
{}
It’s the people who are putting corporate profits ahead of human lives who need to explain themselves. They’re the ones who should be asked why corporate profits count more than lives. They’re the ones who should be asked why working class citizens should be forced to decide between paying for an insurance bill or paying their rent in order to make sure that no insurance company executive goes without a fresh supply of yachts and fancy cars. They should be forced to explain why insurance company executive yachts count more than your ability to avoid homelessness, or your ability to have a perfectly treatable illness actually treated.
The news has been fast and furious as we approach Labor Day with media outlets trying to out-do each other with "breaking news stories" about what President Obama will or will not support in the health care fight as we enter the the final few innings of this debate.
Administration officials said Wednesday that Mr. Obama would be more specific than he has been to date about what he wants included in the plan. Doing so amounts to an acknowledgment that the president’s prior tactic of laying out broad principles and leaving Congress to fill in the details was no longer working and that Mr. Obama needed to become more personally involved in shaping the outcome.But the officials said Mr. Obama was unlikely to unveil a detailed legislative plan of his own. And they insisted that Mr. Obama had not given up on the provision that has attracted the most fire from the right, a proposal for a government-run competitor to private insurers, although many Democrats say the proposal may eventually be jettisoned.
{}
For now, White House officials said, Mr. Obama remains committed to the goal of insuring all Americans and still prefers to foster competition for insurance companies by creating a new government insurance program, or public option.
...what Chuck Todd thinks, he just said unequivocally on Andrea Mitchell that the Finance Committee bill is Obama's preferred bill, that it is being done with the cooperation of the White House, and that once it is released, Obama will do everything in his power to pass that bill.
We have been saying all along that the most important part of this debate is not the public option, but rather ensuring choice and competition,” an aide said. “There are lots of different ways to get there.”
And Ed Henry on CNN said yesterday in their big breaking story that the White House was negotiating to get a Snowe job.
Ed Henry: My colleague Dana Bash and I have learned from a source, each one of us, that this White House right now is very quietly in serious conversations with Republican Senator Olympia Snowe, a key moderate.
She is basically the last Republican out of those gang of six senators who have been negotiating, really the last Republican that has an open line to this White House right now.
What we're hearing that she's talking about with White House staff is sort of a scaled-back bill that would focus on insurance reforms that both sides could agree to, but would not have a full public option, instead, would have a so-called trigger. What that means in layman's terms is basically that the insurance companies would have a couple of years to make some dramatic changes.
If they do not make those changes, then a public option would be triggered. So, it would be used down the road. They would hope that this would appease liberals by saying it's not completely off the table. And the big hope is that this could bring along another moderate Republican, like maybe Susan Collins of Maine, some conservative Democrats, like Ben Nelson and Mary Landrieu in the Senate, who don't want a public option, but would sort of potentially be open to a trigger like this.
Basically we still don't know what's actually going to happen until the president takes the stage and speaks to the nation and then even after that, the Baucus Dogs still have to release their bill. And then we move on to the next step in the process. This is a massive clusterf*&k, but getting any type of health care reform passed was never going to be easy. We all knew it, I just thought Axelrod's team would have handled it better from the start.
OK, what's the next big breaking story and what will it contradict? I can just see a bunch of WH aides jotting down suggestions and putting them in a shoe box. When a reporter comes sniffing around, they take turns pulling out a piece of paper from the box and passing along their tip. Repeat as often as necessary. Then at night, all the aides go to the bar, get hammered and laugh as it appears in the news.
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Bernie Sanders says "enough is enough", let's get Sen. Kennedy's bill from the Health Committee passed. As Keith and Bernie note during the segment, here is some of what Senator Kennedy is hopefully remembered for.
Olbermann: Meals on Wheels, AIDS research, other medical research, cancer research, nutrition programs for pregnant women and children, expanded uninsurance to the unemployed, occupational safety regulations. That's just the first few items on the list of things brought to this nation by Senator Kennedy. It is so long it is hard to imagine that there is an America living today whose body, literally body, is not in better shape than it would have been were not for this man. Correct?
Sanders: That is exactly right. I mean among so many other things, pushing Medicare, pushing Medicaid, pushing children's health insurance for eighteen million Americans today who have access to primary health care through community health centers. That program was developed by Senator Ted Kennedy.
Bernie goes on to explain that Kennedy felt that all Americans should have health care as a right of citizenship and how woefully behind we are with other industrialized nations with what we spend on health care compared to our health care outcomes.
As Bernie notes, what came out of the Health Committee was actually a decent piece of legislation and it would be nice to see the Democrats get on board with it and at least not filibuster the legislation if they could manage to get Kennedy's bill rather than the mess that's coming out of the Finance Committee on to the Senate floor for a vote.
Personally I'd like to see them force any of them to do an actual filibuster if they don't want to see some real reform get through. Make them go stand up on the Senate floor and defend the insurance industry profits until they're blue in the face if that's the line in the sand these guys want to draw. And let them break out the cots and diapers while they're at it.
I'm glad to see Bernie as usual being one of the ones speaking up about real reform means. We could use a whole lot more like him. Unfortunately I get to pick from the choice between right wing crazy and Republican-lite where I'm from.
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Oh joy. More wonderful news from the world of Max Baucus satistying the insurance companies with some payola for their campaign contributions. Is this what's going to be passed off for "reform"?
This is good news for UnitedHealth, which benefits when patients pick up more of the tab. In late spring, the Finance Committee was assuming a 76% reimbursement rate on average, meaning consumers would be responsible for paying the remaining 24% of their medical bills, in addition to their insurance premiums. Stevens and his UnitedHealth colleagues urged a more industry-friendly ratio. Subsequently the committee reduced the reimbursement figure to 65%, suggesting a 35% contribution by consumers—more in line with what the big insurer wants. The final figures are still being debated.
Stevens says UnitedHealth and its corporate clients want to steer Congress toward benefit levels and cost sharing that can help control overall health spending: "We are providing another resource of actual modeling and advice on how proposals in the committees are structured and some potential unintended consequences of going down certain routes."
Perhaps more than any other insurer, UnitedHealth is poised to profit from health reform. Its decade-long series of acquisitions has made the company a coast-to-coast Leviathan enmeshed in the lives of 70 million Americans.
As Wendell Potter notes in the interview, this is "the last trick up their sleeves to try to control health care costs for themselves" and that they used to spend about 95 cents of every dollar on medical claims. They pay no where near that now and this would make their reimbursement rates even lower.
If this is what comes out of the Senate and called reform, doing nothing would truly be better than this.
