Derailing Obama’s health plan
By Charlene Jones
Shortly after the American Hospital Association (www.aha.org) and America’s Health Insurance Plans (www.ahip.org ) changed their minds in May about volunteering to save Americans $2 trillion over 10 years, Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina hired a public relations firm to derail President Obama’s public health plan.
The Washington Post’s May 18 story about Blue Cross/Blue Shield revealed a campaign as slick as the infamous ad couple Harry and Louise who helped kill health care reform in the 1990s.
The health care industry is doing what it’s done for decades when things heat up—spending money where it counts and volunteering to serve their country only long enough to distract. According to the non-partisan Center for Responsive Politics, they’ve spent more than $134 million on lobbying in the first quarter of 2009 alone. They are also suiting up, like doctors before a major operation, with major publicity assaults on any reform that threatens profits from disease and dying.
When then-President Jimmy Carter talked about controlling costs, according to a May 11 New York Times story, drug makers, insurance companies and hospitals agreed to help slow the spiral but bills soared higher than ever a few years later. By the early 1990s, Americans were pinched again. This time the health industry financed one of the most expensive and devious public relations campaigns ever launched. Harry and Louise prevailed and profiteering grew.
"In saying they can voluntarily slash $200 billion a year off the country’s medical bills over the next decade and still preserve their profits, healthcare companies implicitly acknowledged they were plotting to fleece consumers and have been fleecing them for years," wrote David Sirota of Creators Syndicate on May 15. "With that acknowledgment came the tacit admission that the industry’s business is based not on respectable returns, but on grotesque profiteering and waste—the kind that can give up $2 trillion and still guarantee huge margins."
Huge margins became the mantra of a cost-cutting, profit-incentive health industry culture championed by Rick Scott, the Sam Walton of health care industry, according to Fortune Magazine in an April 9 profile. Scott’s maneuvering is renowned for a couple of reasons. Columbia/HCA, the company he founded in 1987, skyrocketed in a few short years to become the largest hospital corporation in the country, leaving other providers dead or dying in its wake. Then a US Justice Department investigation into false claims submitted to Medicare and other federal programs resulted in Scott’s forced departure in 1997 and a 2003 fraud settlement, the largest in US history, for $1.7 billion.
Profits from his current investments in health care and plastics continue, however, to enable Scott to fund more propaganda, including the front group Conservatives for Patients’ Rights (CPR), according to the Huffington Post. The group hired CRC Public Relations, a key player in ‘swiftboating’ presidential candidate John Kerry. Recently, CPR aired a 30-minute TV "documentary" in late May which, along with $5 million ad campaign starring Scott himself, are both bent on scuttling public support for any meaningful reform to American health care.
While polls convincingly show that Americans, including Republicans, want major health care reforms, with a public insurance plan open to everyone, insurance companies collect premiums and co-pays that may well bankroll propaganda to defeat any significant change to better serve the public interest.
Remember, Blue Cross of California, the largest insurer in the state, was in the news for allegedly "rescinding" health insurance policies based upon the illegal practice known as "post-claims underwriting," leaving the insured individual with the outstanding bills not paid by the health insurer. And then only after exposure by the Los Angeles Times did Blue Cross cease asking physicians to alert them to preexisting conditions of their patients.
These are the suits who volunteered, and then didn’t, to help out a nation in a double economic crisis—not the mortgage crisis but the gaping wound in health care—millions without health coverage, thousands losing coverage every day, and budget-busting medical costs the leading cause of bankruptcy. Dizzier yet? Coming soon, the son of Harry and Louise.
Charlene Jones is a consultant who writes for BPM.
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