The New York Times today offers a dispatch on the health care debate from Maine, home of an endangered species: moderate Republican senators. The piece offers a solid look at the debate playing out among different constituencies to win the hearts and minds of Sens. Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, whose votes may determine whether key features of the reform proposal—such as a “public option” that would compete with private health care insurers—survive. And it notes that while Snowe is so far the only Senate Republican to back a public option, Collins has “expressed reservations” about such a move. But it leaves out one interesting tidbit.
As the story notes, Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield is the “dominant private insurer in the state.” In fact, according to a 2007 report about consolidation in the insurance industry by the American Medical Association, WellPoint, Inc., an affiliate of Blue Cross, has a 78 percent share of the combined HMO/PPO market in Maine.
What the story doesn’t note is that Blue Cross has been a major political donor to Collins. According to the Web site OpenSecrets.org, with total donations nearing $50,000, it has been the fifth-highest contributor to her campaign committees and leadership PACs over the course of her career. (The corporation’s contributions to Snowe have been much smaller.) And while Blue Cross hasn’t posted a white paper on reform to its Web site, it’s not much of a stretch to think it wouldn’t welcome competition, from a public option or any other source.
There’s nothing unusual in one of a state’s major companies making donations to its elected officials, of course, and Collins isn’t slavishly bound to her donors’ interests. (In fact, the story quotes one advocate who thinks the biggest influence on Collins’s vote may be Snowe’s.) But as the press tracks the health care debate, it should follow the money—and report what it finds—at every step.
Why make the insurance industry the major whipping boy?
To put the $50,000 Blue Cross and Blue Shield contribution to a Maine Senator into persdpective, compare that to the reported $182 million per annum of political contributions by the pharmaceuticqal industry and nearly as much by the health care professionals.
U.S. health care costs twice as much as that of most advanced foreign nations with quality (i.e., morbidity and mortality) no better than theirs. That happens because U.S. care providers are on a gravy train. Thair political contributions buy immunity from meaningful government regulation that would control cost and quality of their products and services.
Only 20 percent of payments to private insurers and a lesser percentage of monies spent by government for health programs, stays with those insurers. More than 80 percent of health care money goes to vendors of health products and services. Even if insurers kept no money for administration and profits, U.S. health care would still cost much more than that in foreign countries. So, providers of care, not insurers, produce most of the waste in U.S. health care.
The notion that a U.S. government option will cut cost is laughable. Medicare suffers with the same inflation as do other financiers of care in the U.S. Therefore, Like Medicare did, a government option (that will not cover every American) will expand the number of care providers and patients whose uncontrolled and excessive health care utilization with unconscionalby high fees has inflated U.S. costs to twice the levels in other countries that cover all their citizens.
In a coutry with fee for service medicine, a profit uber allus motivation for health care providers like Americans in every other U.S. industry, and finaciers of care with no valid way to prevent high fees, overutilization, and poor quality of care, insured health care is a license to steal. Private insurers give only a small portion of health care political contributions because they compete heavily on price and because they have only nomial profits to protect (less than 4 percent of their health care premiums and less than 2 percent of health care costs). Care providers (doctors, hospitals, drug manufactirers, and other providers of health products and services) give more more than 95 percent of health care related political contributions because they reap nearly all the profits from an open-ended system of provider remuneration.
Health care in foreign nations costs much less because a closed end government budgetcontrols the costs of health product and service. To compete for budgeted funds, cae poviders in foreign countries must bargain for and limit their utilization of care to that whiuch is most effective and their compensation (fees, charges, salaries and fringe benefits) at levels that are competitive. Those levels are half ours.
The future of our nation is in jeopardy. The Obama/Conress' health care reform will be meaningless either with or without a public option. A typical government program, it will vastly exceed its estimated added cost of $880 billion over 10 years - because there will still be no effective controls on utilization or cost of health products and services. With Federal debt already at unrecedneted levels, deficits at three times any previous levels, and an aconomy in the doldurms, Federal officials are giving up the last opportunity to solve the Federal financial cisis. Simply by saving the 8.5 percent of GDP wasted on useless and overly costly health care, he could save the U.S. from becomiong a financial dependent of the rest of the world.
#1 Posted by GHA, CJR on Fri 9 Oct 2009 at 11:10 PM