Health Insurance Industry Gets the Profits, Patients Get the Shaft

by Mike Hall, Mar 10, 2009

A wide range of approaches and proposals mark the debate on health care reform. The insurance industry group, America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), has a pretty “simple plan” says Ethan Rome, deputy campaign manager for Health Care for America Now! (HCAN).

They get the profits and we get the shaft.

Rome and some 100 union, health care and community activists, including members of the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee (CNA/NNOC) and Working America, rallied outside AHIP’s National Policy Forum at Washington, D.C.’s Ritz-Carlton hotel this morning.

Calling for “real reform and not rhetoric,” the group denounced AHIP’s “astroturf” health care reform campaign orchestrated by private, for-profit health insurance executives that is masquerading as a grassroots initiative.

Rome told the crowd that during the past five years, health insurance company profits have soared by 1,000 percent while health care premiums for working families have risen five times faster than wages.

They raise our premiums, they raise our deductibles, they raise our co-pays each and every year and now they’re conducting a fake campaign for reform.

Rep. Eric J.J. Massa (D-N.Y.) said that health care reform was the issue that propelled him to victory in November and that voters across the nation are ready to back comprehensive health care reform. But they must be ready to push back against the health insurance industry that will fight mightily to retain its health care power and profits.

There are vast numbers of middle-class people denied a place at the health care table…we need a grassroots movement whose voices cannot be silenced and we need a unique American solution…and we can never cave in on our core principle that at the end of the day we must provide quality health care for all.

The tight grip health insurance companies have on the health care system—who gets care and who is denied—doesn’t just affect patients, but providers, too. Mary Jennings, a University of South Carolina medical student, said she dreaded the day when health insurers dictate how she will practice medicine.

We have to today take our health care system back because if we don’t some day, some insurance company executive will tell me I can’t provide a CAT scan for my patient or I can’t order a test for my patient, that I can’t provide treatment for my patients….We demand a public plan at a bare minimum

Big health insurance company profits mean big pay for health insurance company executives—some $14.2 million a year for the top seven CEOs. Along with zealously protecting profits, one of biggest tasks for AHIP—the public face of the insurance industry—is to deflect public attention from those profits and portray the industry as caring and reform-minded. That’s the main job of AHIP CEO Karen Ignagni, who is, says HCAN,

consistently saying one thing but promoting another when it comes to health care reform that actually put people’s health before corporate profits.

At the end of the rally, Donna Smith, a CNA/NNOC community organizer, and several others tried to enter the hotel to present Ignagni a special award—a 24-inch x 36-inch certificate honoring her as “The Best Protector of Insurance Company Profits at the Expense of Our Health.”

But hotel security agents barred their way. Not to be deterred, the group placed the certificate on the trunk of a stretch black limousine at the foot of the hotel’s long circular driveway just before it pulled away. The sign almost made it to the hotel entrance before security guards snatched it away. But it’s pretty certain that Ignagni and AHIP got the message.

Click here to read a report on last week’s White House Health Care Summit, and here, here and here for more on health care reform.

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