The White House Is Bribing Health Insurance Companies

[JamesL]

Want to know what’s happening with Obamacare? Good luck finding out. The White House recently adopted a new approach for updating Americans on the country’s most consequential law. I call it the “needle in a haystack” method: Bury the announcement in hundreds of pages of regulations and hope no one finds it.

The White House tried a test run several weeks ago. Hidden in the midst of a 436 page regulatory update, and written in pure bureaucratese, the Department of Health and Human Services asked that insurance companies limit the looming premium increases for 2015 health plans. But don’t worry, HHS hinted: we’ll bail you out on the taxpayer’s dime if you lose money.

No wonder there wasn’t a press release. The White House is playing politics with Americans’ health care—and they’re bribing health insurance companies to play along.

The administration’s intention is clear: Salvage the 2014 midterm elections. Typically, insurance companies release their premium rates between summer and early fall—i.e., right before voters cast their ballots in November. If premiums skyrocket—which looks increasingly likely—then voters won’t look too kindly on Senators and Representatives who voted for Obamacare and created this problem.

Hence the White House’s desperate damage control. It almost worked: No one noticed when the regulations were first released. In fact, it took days for any news outlet to find the language and then translate it into readable English. TownHall.com figured it out first. The Los Angeles Times then reported that “hold[ing] down premium increases for next year” is a “top priority” for President Obama since “rates will be announced ahead of this fall’s congressional elections.” If there were a Pulitzer Prize for understatement, the Times would have won it.

But the White House may still get away with its attempted sleight of hand. Technically, the regulations don’t force health insurance companies to tamp down their premium spikes. But the White House isn’t asking nicely.

The administration knows that insurance companies owe it. Obamacare’s architects made sure that these companies would be invested in the law’s success. The individual mandate is proof. It could bring insurers some 25 million new customers, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Each new customer comes with the monthly premiums that boost the industry’s bottom line. No wonder analysts now predict that the five major health insurance companies will see their profit margins increase by hundreds of millions, or even billions, of dollars in the next few years.

Even if they don’t want to play along, it’s still in these companies best interests to assent to the administration’s “request.” Under Obamacare, insurers are so heavily regulated that they have to play nice with the bureaucrats who call the shots. The President isn’t the only government official who carries a big stick.

If insurance companies don’t give in, regulators have powerful ways to make life hard for them. A shrewd CEO doesn’t need to look far to see what might happen if his company opts out. This administration already has a reputation for strong-arming dissenting businesses in other industries.

To be fair, this isn’t the first time that the White House has rewritten Obamacare in order to save electoral face. Several months ago, HHS quietly delayed the individual mandate for three years for anyone whose plan was canceled last fall. No surprise there: The unwitting victims of the President’s broken promise that they could keep their health care plans wouldn’t stay silent if they were then hit with Obamacare’s tax penalty for not having health insurance.

These may not be the only examples where the administration has lawlessly rewritten Obamacare without letting the American people know. The law created at least 11,000 pages of new regulation, with more added every day. The White House got caught this time—but they’ll have plenty of other chances to hide the truth.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/theapot...-house-is-bribing-health-insurance-companies/

 

[dbphoenix]

Do you recall why we don't have single payer?

 

[Max E.]

Do you recall why we don't have single payer?

Because the 60 dems in the senate who had a veto proof super majority didnt want it. Go figure.

 

[dbphoenix]

Because the 60 dems in the senate who had a veto proof super majority didnt want it. Go figure.

Do you recall the relationship of congressmen with the insurance companies and drug companies?

 

[Arnie]

Do you recall the relationship of congressmen with the insurance companies and drug companies?

Do you recall that Obama basically cemented those relationships by the way the ACA was written and passed?

 

[jem]

Not only can we remember we can watch it.
The white house and the dems sold out of single payer to their paymasters... wall street's insurance companies. Just after bush and the establishment team sold us out out to the wall street owned drug companies on medicare part d.

The establishment cronies take any reform idea and then force almost all the dems and the establishment Rs to jump around in front of the camera like sea world mammals and do tricks for us.... as they sell us out behind the scenes and then vote.

Washing d.c. and the media get to put on a disgusting show. If you watch how it is all orchestrated a few times... you see the script time and again.
A few lone wolves cry. Then a few trained mamamal congress people... then a few more... then some business leaders or some community organizers... then more congress people then a fed spokesmodel like bufffet or pimco or soros come out... then a fake poll or two and then we are screwed.

The dems had a majority they could have made single payer. They proved themselves to be the whores they are.


http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/obamasdeal/view/

The administration's hopes for reform rested with Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.), the powerful head of the Senate Finance Committee, who also happened to be one of the Senate's top recipients of special interest money from the health care industry.

The White House encouraged Baucus to quietly negotiate deals with the insurance lobby, drug companies and other special interest groups, despite promises to run a different kind of White House. "The president said that having people at the table is better than having them throw stuff at the table," White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer tells FRONTLINE.

But the deals were often controversial. FRONTLINE investigates how, near the start of the health care reform process, Baucus and the White House negotiated a secret $80 billion deal with Billy Tauzin, the former Louisiana congressman who had become the pharmaceutical industry's top lobbyist.

"People who thought that the pharmaceutical industry was still reaping profits that were excessive were unhappy with that deal and were particularly unhappy that it got cut behind closed doors," says the co-chair of Obama's transition team, John Podesta.

The pact with Tauzin was only the beginning of a series of deals designed to win over potential opponents. The most notorious agreement, known as the "Cornhusker Kickback," was concluded only days before a vote on the health care bill in the Senate. In exchange for the support of Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.), the White House and Senate leaders agreed to spend $100 million to benefit Nebraska.

The administration argued the deals were necessary to secure health reform. But the deals backfired. "It's not a pretty process," says David Gergen, who's been an adviser to four different presidents, both Republican and Democratic, over the last several decades. "There is deal making -- that's the way it's been done for a long time. But those deals done in your front parlor can be pretty smelly. The public was already up to here with what they were seeing in Washington, and I think it just put them over the side."

The backlash grew across the country. The president's approval ratings sunk, the Democrats lost control of Ted Kennedy's Senate seat, and the push for health care reform was suddenly in peril.

"The grassroots of America had turned against this," Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) tells FRONTLINE. "Health care was kind of the straw that broke the camel's back."

At the White House, the president was forced to come to terms with what looked to be his most significant failure as president, before a last push this winter -- and a last round of high-stakes, round-the-clock deal making -- finally pushed the bill through.

"The process was messy, and so it turned people off," says Communications Director Pfeiffer. "It ended up being behind closed doors. It was filled with partisan wrangling, people yelling at each other across the table. We ended up having a process that represented a lot of what the American people hated about Washington."

"There is a realism that it has come with a cost," veteran Washington Post reporter Dan Balz observes. "We don't know what's going to happen in the November elections. We don't know what's going to happen in 2012. But there's no question that this health care battle has put his party at risk. And how they deal with that is the next chapter. But this was a historic moment."