Harry Reid Plays Chin Music With Insurance Companies; Threatens Repeal of Anti-Trust Exemption
By Susie Madrak Thursday Oct 15, 2009 11:00amWell, looky here. Harry Reid is sending a not-so-veiled message to the insurance industry: You want to play dirty? We can play dirty, too. Here's hoping this legislation has a chance of getting passed:
In a rare appearance as a witness at a Senate hearing, the majority leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, told the Judiciary Committee on Wednesday that it should repeal a 1945 law that granted the insurance industry limited exemption to national antitrust laws by allowing states to regulate insurers.
The law, the McCarran-Ferguson Act, is often cited by Mr. Reid and other critics of the health insurance industry as a reason why coverage can be so expensive for many people. They say the law allows insurers to monopolize markets and fix prices in ways that are usually illegal.
“Since 1945, the insurance industry has enjoyed exemption from federal antitrust laws because of the McCarran-Ferguson Act,” Mr. Reid said. “Pat McCarran, who was the senior senator from Nevada at the time, lent his name to this piece of legislation. Although we’re both Nevadans, I’m not sure what Pat McCarran had in mind when he pushed this bill. And if Pat were around today, he couldn’t be happy with the state of the insurance industry.”
“Providing an exemption for insurance companies to antitrust laws has been anticompetitive and damaging to the American economy,” Mr. Reid continued. “Health insurance premiums have continued to rise at a rapid rate, forcing businesses to cut back on health insurance coverage and forcing many families to choose between health insurance and basic necessities.”
He added: “Insurance companies have become so large they dominate entire regions of the country. They have become so powerful they block start-up businesses from entering the market, and they put smaller companies out of business. They have become so dominant that they dictate business practices. They are so influential that they exert tremendous influence over public policy.”
The chairman of the Judiciary Committee, Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, has introduced a bill — the Health Insurance Industry Antitrust Enforcement Act — that would repeal the insurance industry’s limited exemption.
And some senior Democrats, including Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York, have begun calling for Mr. Leahy’s bill to be included in the major health care legislation that is now advancing in Congress.
That effort could gain momentum as Democrats continue to hit back at a main industry trade group, America’s Health Insurance Plans, which issued a report on Sunday night asserting that the Democrats’ legislation would lead to a steep rise in health insurance premiums.
The White House, Congressional Democrats and other supporters of the legislation have worked to discredit the industry report, which was prepared by PricewaterhouseCoopers. The firm has acknowledged that it looked at only four provisions in the huge health care bill and that it did not take into account federal subsidies that would be made available to help moderate-income Americans buy insurance.
Mr. Schumer, a member of the Senate Finance Committee, issued a news release Wednesday accusing the health insurance industry of trying to “sucker-punch” the Democrats’ health care legislation by issuing the report the day before the Finance Committee voted on its version of the bill.
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Hmmm...so...will the CEO of CIGNA be treated to a personal appearance by Harry Reid's nutsack?
I am sure Reid has some intern working on the required cut and past for the pertinent "strong worded letter" he will be sending to the concierge of CIGNA to be passed on to the CEO at his earliest convenience next month or so.
That will show'em!
did not bring this up first...It was Schumer who brought it up in committee and another senator had a bill in the works...Harry could not lead an ant out of a paper bag or we would have ALREADY had HC Reform with a PO!
Harry Reid is Back to the Future's feeble, non-confronational father of Marty McFly, circa 1955.
In the real world, Harry Reid was a high school football player and amateur boxer in 1955.
... it does not necessarily means he was a good one.
Maybe one punch too many to the nut sack explains his lack of anything resembling a spine and/or leadership?
...Reid doesn't appear to be able to summon that time to kick ass mentality when needed.
This antitrust exemption needs to be shut down immediately. If not, I demand to have one too.
These Democrats could prove to be tough after all……
Wait, there are pigs flying by my window…
I'll finish this comment later…
Probably beats what I was listening to last night, songs by: Marlene Dietrich, Edith Piaf, Deena Durbin, Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith and Maria Callas
Then had dinner while listening Brace Beemer as The Lone Ranger.
(God I hate "Reality" TV!!!).
Silly me...how could I forget?
And Grace Jones.
Call Senator Majority Leader Harry Reid at 202-224-3542 and tell him to include a public option and public option plus in the merged Senate bill.
Get as many signatures on Governor Dean's http://americacantwait.com as possible, so that it increases the impact when the signatures are delivered next week.
And of course, you should contact your public option supportive Senators and tell them thank you and insist they stand strong.
It is as plain as day. Harry Reid can add a robust Public Option on his own to the Health Care Bill. Then the Senate will need 60 votes to REMOVE the Public Option from the bill. If Harry Reid leaves the Public Option out then it will take 60 votes to put it in. The whole Public Option concept depends on what Harry Reid does. Call Harry Reid's office right now and tell him he needs to include a robust Public Option concept in the final Senate bill since the Public Option concept will control health care costs for the consumers. Without the Public Option Harry Reid has sold out the average American. It is all dependent on Harry Reid's actions!
Call all the knuckle draggers on the Public Option...Remind them they are there to do the work of the people at the will of the people! Who cares about the Snowes ---Dems have the votes and they need to cast them!
Shameless pandering to the corporate whores...Horrid horrid horrid--blast them for this...even let the repubs filibuster on record! We can use the loop in 2010!
Reid is a panty waste as are Baucus- Conrad et al!
What is that ad for Anne Coulter doing at the top of the C&L web page?
[Here's a link to the C&L Advertising FAQ. Site Monitor]
would give them hell
Oh, please.
Ok. Yeah. Repealing the law is a good, no, GREAT idea. A good first step. A no brainer in fact.
But, this is Harry we are talking about. Mr. Snivel. You know?...the guy who the GOP thugs in the Senate Minority say is "In Charge" and than laugh like Limbaugh on the 9th hole at the Oxycontin Country Club? Yeah. THAT Guy.
Make me a liar, Harry. Please.
The one word that does not appear in the notes on his life Abram prepared near the end of his life, when instead of sheepskin he wore silk and gabardine, when instead of miners and cowboys he preached to senators and presidents, is power. But in 1935, when Abram was just beginning to dream his real ministry, he wrote the word once, in the margin of a church program. It was at the bottom of a list of names of men he had recruited.
Besides each was a responsibility: organization, finances. Beside his own name, he wrote power—and then crossed it out. If it must be said, it can't be had. Power, Abram realized as he moved through the high corner offices of businessmen and leaders, has nothing to do with forcing the devil behind you or making the company increase your wages. Power lies in things as they are. God had already chosen the powerful, his key men. There they are, Jesus whispered in Abram's ear; go and serve them.
Throughout the 1920s, Abram directed Seattle's division of Goodwill Industries. He didn't just open stores for used clothes; he organized 49,000 housewives into thirty-seven districts and set them to work salvaging goods for the poor. In 1932, Franklin Roosevelt, governor of New York, invited Abram to his office to discuss his organizing system. Later he'd come to see Russian red running through out Roosevelt's New Deal, but at the time Abram was captivated by another man summoned to advise the governor, James Augustine Farrell, president of the United States Steel Corporation. Abram had met industry chiefs before then, but here was a titan. A tall, stern man of dark suits and high collars, Farrell had led U.S. Steel for decades, since not long after its creation as the biggest business enterprise in history, and he had a reputation as an industrial free thinker. The year before he'd rebuked a group of businessmen for treating workers like animals. Farrell looked on his employees more like children. Big business, he believed, ought to act as a big brother, and to that end he insisted that the age of competition had passed;
"captains of industry must be freed of antitrust legislation so that they might better council together for the good of the innocent and the poor."
Abram fixed his rapt attention on the "steel shogun," as the press of the time called the industrialist. "Mr. Farrell reviewed the history of America," he'd remember, "and pointed out that we have had nineteen depressions—five major ones—and that every one was caused by disobedience to divine laws." Farrell offered no evidence for his dismissal of economic factors, but he did have a solution on hand. "Now," Abram recorded his words, "I am a Roman Catholic and we don't go in much for revivals and such things, but I am sure as I am sitting here that if we don't get a thorough revival of genuine religion ... with a return to prayer and the Bible"—an oddly Protestant aim—"we are headed for chaos."
Farrell suggested that the time had come for the "leaders of industry" to take the reins not just of the economy but of the entire nation in order to restore it to a godly path.
Farrell, a former steelworker himself and thus living proof in his own mind that equal opportunity existed for all, was likely too modest to mention U.S. Steel's own efforts in this regard; most notably, its relief program for the Pennsylvania steeltown of Farrell, renamed just that year in honor of the great man himself. A desperate measure by a community of 30,000 utterly dependent on U.S. Steel and starving because of that fact. In Farrell, U.S. Steel fought the spiritual roots of its economic woes not through revival but by evicting from company housing those who were not part of the nation's godly heritage: foreign-born workers, black workers, and even the old white men who had built Farrell and now approached retirement and pensions.
U.S. Steel replaced them all with young peons paid low wages. It was not a matter of getting the job done, since the mills were shuttered and there was no work to be done. U.S. Steel simply saw an opportunity for a correction.
But then, so did the men and women whom companies such as U.S. Steel were liquidating. It's hard now, in the present United States, to imagine the fear that attended the Depression years, and harder still to remember the anger. Most forgotten of all is the optimism of ordinary people pushed to an edge over which they peered and saw not the abyss they had been told by their employers and their politicians awaited them, but—maybe, if they built it themselves—a future dramatically different from the past.
–JEFF SHARLET (chap. 4 pp. 95-97)
Recreated using PaperPort version 11.1 (11.1.0.300)
Gee. Thanks for not reproducing the whole damn book.
√
not exempt from anti-trust laws who seem to compete in every area other than price: energy, finance, etc.
I still want to see the minutes from Cheney's energy task force meetings he held in '01 with oil execs and lobbyists.
n/t
Oooh - repealing McCarran-Ferguson is the perfect answer. That law is the holy grail of insurance companies. It is what keeps them making obscene profits, because states have to deal individually with them, and the federal government can't intervene. Seriously, insurance companies LOVE this law and regard it as sacred scripture. Push for this one, folks. If government gets serious about it, we've got 'em by the short and curlies.
I always thought Harry Reid looked more like Shemp.
to the Health Insurance Parasites, how the fucking holy hell is he gonna get enough votes to repeal an anti-trust exemption?
Somebody, please 'splain this to me?
It makes adequate theater and poor copy.
And Aint Gonna Happun!
Seriously, people. Insurance companies will feel threatened if this gets even a little traction. They have used this law to avoid competition and accountability forever. Take it away, come up with a decent public option and this just might work.
After reading the headline, all I can think is, "Oh, Reid must be a Ballchinian".
I have no faith in Harry to the rescue.
You're giving him way to much credit. Ballchinians actually have balls.
is providing the analysis of Anything, you can rest assured that it contains nothing but LIES and exaggerations benefiting whomever foots the bill for the report - in this case, the insurance companies.
I know this because both of the major insurance companies I previously worked for (but in an ancillary company, not the actual insurance business) used to hire PwC all the time - for exorbitant amounts of money - for the sole purpose of justifying the wants and needs of the senior management relative to the business entity I worked for. If the senior mgt./CEOs had actually given our management team the hundreds of thousands of dollars they spent on PwC trying to prove us wrong, we could have made the business much more competitive and profitable.
Actually, dealing with senior management and PwC made me happy that they eliminated my job in 2002 - cause they all made me want to puke!
... takes out his paper sword and cut's out his paper asshole!
harry won't do shit!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
they won't have to call his bluff.
He sounds tepid and weak even when he threatens. Just do it! They should not be an exempt industry anyway. Then "threats" will be more effective in the future...they'll hold more water.
Reid's tepid style of leadership does more to dispel any belief in his follow-through than anything that comes out of his mouth.
"Threatens" Repeal of Anti-Trust Exemption?
Here's an idea. Trade what is fair, right and long overdue for some quibbling point in 1,000 pages of legislation protecting insurance companies.
to play that 'chin music'?
over cooked pasta noodles?
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