Health-insurance lobbyists are gearing up to deliver a new message to Congress after the election: When it comes to rising health care costs, they don’t deserve the blame.
No matter who wins the election, rising health care costs will almost certainly continue to be a financial burden. That’s true for individual consumers, who keep spending more on premiums, and for the federal government.
In discussions about that topic, health insurers rarely come across in a positive light. One survey back in the late 1990s had people say whether various industries do “good jobs.” Health insurers came in third to last, with 48 percent of Americans thinking they did a good job. They were rated worse than oil companies but better than tobacco manufacturers.
During the health-care reform debate, insurers often found their premium increases playing foil to President Obama’s call to pass the Affordable Care Act.
Moving into a potential debate over deficit reduction, health insurers want to carve out a different role in Washington. Namely, they don’t want to be the bad guys anymore. To that end, they will soon start arming their lobbyists with data suggesting that other health-care sectors are the ones to blame.
“For a number of years, when people talk about health-care costs, the debate has focused exclusively on premiums,” said Karen Ignagni, president of the Association of Health Insurance Plans (AHIP). “If you’re going to have a debate and discussion about what’s driving health care costs, you have to get under the hood.”
Ignagni said she expects that in any discussion of deficit reduction, “one of the first things we’ll do is turn our heads towards rising health care costs.” It’s possible that Medicare Advantage plans, for example, might end up on the table for reduced reimbursement rates. States could take a second look at how much they pay the health insurers that administer their Medicaid programs.
Ignagni is readying for these types of fights. Her organization plans to use federal data to argue, in statehouses and in Washington, that they are not the ones to blame for the growth in health-care costs.
The goal, Ignagni said, is to dig further into what actually drives up costs. That’s a debate, Ignagni thinks, that the insurers are well positioned to have, and win — with their many charts in hand, of course.
They should take congress to task. After all, healthcare costs have been sky-rocketing ever since congress got involved in 1965 under johnson, while before that time, costs were essentially flat…
http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/spending_chart_1950_2010USp_13s1li011mcn_10t#copypaste
Medicare-for-All–the Canadian model–would save the US money. Single-payer eliminates the administrative costs of the for-profit model, for starters.
“… including the elderly in a universal, nonprofit, publicly administered single-payer system has been the key to Canada’s cost control. Although U.S. Medicare is often called a single-payer system, that’s not quite accurate. It’s true that traditional Medicare is relatively efficient – only about 2 percent of its budget goes to administration, according the most recent trustees’ report, versus about 14 percent for privately run Medicare managed-care plans – but Medicare is only one of many health care payers in the United States.
“As a result,” Woolhandler said, “doctors’ and hospitals’ administrative costs are inflated by having to deal with a multitude of payers and by having to track eligibility, attribute costs and bill for individual services. This extra paperwork and bureaucracy is a major contributor to rising costs in the U.S., and these costs spill over into the relatively efficient Medicare program.
“In contrast, Canada’s single-payer system is much more streamlined and lean throughout, with big dividends for clinical care.”
This is from Physicians for a National Health Program, citing: “Cost control in a parallel universe: Medicare spending in the U.S. and Canada,” David U. Himmelstein, M.D., Steffie Woolhandler, M.D., M.P.H. Archives of Internal Medicine, online publication date Oct. 29, 2012.
And, to pre-empt the trolls who will offer trumped-up horror stories about Canada, here’s a quote from the Canadian Medical Association: “As Republican strategist Dr. Frank Luntz puts it, the opposition’s strategy rests on “health care denial horror stories from Canada.” 2 Yet the attacks are so absurd and full of fantasy that they would be laughable — if not for the fact that many Americans believe them.” http://www.cmaj.ca/content/181/8/E128.full?etoc
Spoken like a true dem troll…
A “troll” who gets facts from reliable sources such as the Canadian Medical Association Journal, and not Fox News…
Heuristic..i know..move up and let us know..it works great for those not sick!
Health insurers add nothing to the equation. Rather they immediately drain 15+ percent directly OUT of the money pool right off the top that will NEVER be spent on human health care. Next, they sit back and “manage “ health care by making you and your doctor jump through multiple hoops and other time wasting delays that seem more designed to justify their existence. It’s a foolish little game and a disgraceful business that ought to go away.
Single payor universal health care NOW!
Ya! Not to say anything on pre.existing conditions…like getting home insurance after the fire!foolish