White House, Dems Unite Against Health Insurers

In public, Democrats are united by a common enemy: the health insurance industry. But privately, leaders are meeting to iron out differences on the overhaul.
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http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/10/15/united-insurers-dems-iro...

WASHINGTON - White House officials and Senate Democrats are meeting in private to iron out differences on a health care overhaul that could affect every American. In public, they're united by a common enemy: the health insurance industry.

The inside game and the outside game are intersecting on Capitol Hill, with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid testifying at a public hearing in favor of revoking health insurers' antitrust exemption -- then huddling behind closed doors with White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel and committee chairmen to finalize the bill.

With negotiations set to continue through the week, some Democrats were hoping that health insurers had actually done the overhaul drive a favor by going on the attack in recent days with two reports slamming health legislation in the Senate.

Unlike doctors, health insurers aren't winning any popularity contests. And the rollout of a report commissioned by America's Health Insurance Plans, warning that health care premiums would rise under a Senate health care bill, was seen as ham-handed since the findings were quickly shot down by a range of critics. That undercut similar findings in a different report released Wednesday by the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association.

Blue Cross and Blue Shield found that individuals' premiums would rise by 50 percent within five years of enactment of the Senate Finance Committee bill. Blue Cross association officials took pains to detail their methodology and approach as more comprehensive than in the other report. But Democrats had little interest in such distinctions, instead all but using health insurers for target practice.

"They are so anticompetitive. Why? Because they make more money than any other business in America today," Reid contended Wednesday at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing. The topic was repealing an antitrust exemption that's been in place since the mid-1940s, when it was thought insurance regulation was best left to states.

Reid went on to gripe about "the barrage of paid advertising the insurance industry is doing now to prevent a health care bill from passing."

Robert Zirkelbach, spokesman for America's Health Insurance Plans, called the antitrust issue "a political ploy designed to distract attention away from the real issue of rising health care costs."