Obama Threatens Insurance Companies' Anti-Trust Exemption
By Susie Madrak Saturday Oct 17, 2009 2:00pmNice to see Obama taking them on like this. I just wish he talked like this more often:
WASHINGTON — President Obama mounted a frontal assault on the insurance industry on Saturday, accusing it of airing “deceptive and dishonest ads” to derail his health care legislation and threatening to strip the industry of its longstanding exemption from federal anti-trust laws.
In unusually harsh terms, Mr. Obama cast insurance companies as obstacles to change interested only in preserving their own “profits and bonuses” and willing to “bend the truth or break it” to stop his drive to remake the nation’s health care system. The president used his weekly radio and Internet address to push back against industry assertions that legislation will drive up premiums.
The transcript is much more blunt:
A new report for the Business Roundtable – a non-partisan group that represents the CEOs of major companies – found that without significant reform, health care costs for these employers and their employees will well more than double again over the next decade. The cost per person for health insurance will rise by almost $18,000. That’s a huge amount of money. That’s going to mean lower salaries and higher unemployment, lower profits and higher rolls of uninsured. It is no exaggeration to say, that unless we act, these costs will devastate the US economy.
This is the unsustainable path we’re on, and it’s the path the insurers want to keep us on. In fact, the insurance industry is rolling out the big guns and breaking open their massive war chest – to marshal their forces for one last fight to save the status quo. They’re filling the airwaves with deceptive and dishonest ads. They’re flooding Capitol Hill with lobbyists and campaign contributions. And they’re funding studies designed to mislead the American people.
Of course, like clockwork, we’ve seen folks on cable television who know better, waving these industry-funded studies in the air. We’ve seen industry insiders – and their apologists – citing these studies as proof of claims that just aren’t true. They’ll claim that premiums will go up under reform; but they know that the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office found that reforms will lower premiums in a new insurance exchange while offering consumer protections that will limit out-of-pocket costs and prevent discrimination based on pre-existing conditions. They’ll claim that you’ll have to pay more out of pocket; but they know that this is based on a study that willfully ignores whole sections of the bill, including tax credits and cost savings that will greatly benefit middle class families. Even the authors of one of these studies have now admitted publicly that the insurance companies actually asked them to do an incomplete job.
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It'll be interesting to see republicans try to oppose this, since for some of them the solution is being able to buy insurance policies across state lines.
McCarran -Ferguson has be around since 1946 or so Congress should have been on this from the get go...Oh--- They were too busy CYA-ing their jobs at the expense of the American people!
Shameless fools--- call them -remind them who elects them and who they work for! 1.800.828.0498 or 1.877.264.4226...
I remember when getting ripped meant smoking sinsimillian laced with hashish through a bong followed by a gram of coke.
It still means that to some...
indeed!
A kind bong rip PLUS a GRAM of coke???
Sounds more like over-dosing to me....
LOL...
I thought that the anti-trust laws were out there to stimulate competition. Since the debate revolves around competition, I don't understand why there is this exemption.
McCarran-Ferguson Act 1945.
no more exception for the health insurance corporations
obama, do you get it? repeal the exemption don't
just threaten to repeal it. WHOSE SIDE ARE YOU ON?
it is so frustrating to have my democratic party
with a majority and the power to easily pass this
health reform, but have to watch them just
pass their BALLS to the other court for stomping.
harry reid, you are a fucking whimpy asshole
and if you sell out the Democrats and give away
a strong reform......then you will reap all the
consequences for fucking your constituents over.
Is Obama taking a page out of Grayson's playbook?!?
i know rahmbo is looking at the unreal numbers greyson is pulling since he started kicking butt.... they can see the up-swell everytime he is on cable.....
Did he wag his finger?
That will get them…
Just like Teddy Roosevelt, speak loudly and wag your finger…
i love hearing the pres. wax poetic. i like his words. i dont see the follow thru on the heavy issues yet. he can stop the patriot act bs. he can close gitmo. he can do a lot of stuff he aint done yet. i hope he is waiting until health care passes, and then next year before the mid terms he does all the progressive stuff he says he wanted to do....
bust the anti trust for death insurance mafia? one can only hope....
o b ama youre our only hope....
Now let's see Obama call out Senators on the corporate payroll ...
And he will do a mea culpa at the same time…
This I have to see…
Excellent fighting words.
Now let's see some fighting action.
.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ts1xFlQGiSw
Obama sounded a "little like" a libertarian there for a moment.
Hooray for competition and free market!!!
Garbling and incomprehensible?
The pigs toooooo fat, it's now biting the hand that fed it. Repeal the Exemption of the 40's. The insurance industry has taken advantage of the government and now it's getting in the way of the one who fed it. It's time for HARD BALL...
Knock 'em out Dems. They threatened you. They'll keep on threatening you. KNOCK THEM OUT! Go public option! Go single payer. America needs to succeed, not the fat pigs that steal what they eat then throw up on America because they're stuffed. Exemption repealled.
If you're going to take a shot at the industry, you sure don't want to miss, but you really want to make sure you don't just wing them, either.
You definitely aren't going to improve their behavior by even threatening them, much less actually drawing blood. Any serious threat to their control of health care, their ability to siphon off their cut and control the size of that cut, is a mortal threat, because just successfully taking back any portion of that control, and have health care still function alright, much less better, and the grounds for our tolerating any cut that they skim off of health care, disappears. The next developement would be that we would no longer tolerate them taking any cut for what they do, which is worse than nothing, as they simply distort a market to which they contribute nothing productive, yet extract a percentage for the insult.
They're going to fight any effective reform to the death. That was always obvious. Perhaps the administration had, for the sake of the weak sisters on our side, to engage in some sort of attempt to get the industry on board with reform. But there was never any chance that anything but a complete sell-out of reform, that left control completely in the industry's hands, was ever going to get anything but their all-in opposition. And if they're in opposition, they have all sorts of resources to hire fake studies, to hire Congresscritters, to do whatever money can buy in this great free market country of ours.
What our side should have done from the beginning was get behind a plan to frankly and openly kill the health insurance industry. Single payer is not only the best policy, it's the best political solution, because it involves killing the opposition at the outset. The bill should have included a provision requiring the insurers to hand over collected premiums to the single payer as they hand over the liability of providing services for the benegficiaries the single payer was assuming, and for investors to be personally liable to make up any shortfall created by industry expenditure on anything but providing medical services from the date the bill was introduced. The industry wouldn't have been able to spend a dime on fake studies or the purchase of Congresscritters. We're going to end up having to kill the industry anyway, now we've just let them waste more of their beneficiaries' money fighting their beneficiaries' interests along wiht the public interest.
if Obama had started with the dismantling of Health Insurance as we know it, the insurance companies would have played the victims, and would have convinced many that the reform was unnecessarily harsh. This way they have shown their true colors. I doubt they'd get much empathy if they were to be completely eliminated.
Now don't puss out. Pull the goddamn trigger!
give the guy a break he's in the viper's orgy.
*stretch*
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