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Obama targets health insurers, sells reform plan
WASHINGTON - President Barack Obama on Monday intensified his attacks on health insurers and administration officials asked the industry to justify premium increases as the battle to reform America’s expensive healthcare system entered its final stage.
Hitting the road to rally support for a healthcare overhaul, Obama offered some of his toughest criticism yet of an insurance industry which he said placed profits ahead of patients.
“Every year, they raise premiums higher and higher,” Obama said at Arcadia University in Glenside, Pennsylvania. “They will keep doing this for as long as they can get away with it.”
Obama shrugged off warnings of dire consequences in congressional elections in November for Democrats who support his healthcare plan and said failure would leave intact a broken $2.5 trillion healthcare system that is ravaged by greedy health insurers.
“These insurance companies have made a calculation,” Obama said “They’re okay with people being priced out of health insurance because they’ll still make more by raising premiums on the customers they keep.”
Turning up the heat, Health Secretary Kathleen Sebelius sent a letter to top companies such as Aetna Inc and Wellpoint Inc asking them to justify rate increases by making public information about costs, enrollment changes and other details.
“It’s time for these insurance company CEOs to do their part to make the system more transparent for the American people,” Sebelius said. “If insurance companies are going to raise rates, the least they can do is tell us why.”
The Obama administration has targeted health insurers in recent weeks as it launches a final push for an overhaul designed to rein in costs, regulate insurers and expand coverage to tens of millions of Americans.
The House of Representatives is expected to vote by the end of March on the Senate’s version of the healthcare bill, with Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi needing 216 votes to pass it. The House approved its version with only three votes to spare in November.
Top issue in November
Republican leaders say they will make it a top issue in November’s elections and urged Republican candidates to focus on the healthcare bill, which polls show is unpopular with the public.
“A vote for this bill opens an entirely new line of attack on House Democrats,” Johnny Destefano, a House Republican campaign committee official, said in a memo to Republican House candidates.
“Now is the time to apply pressure and force your opponents into taking a stand on whether they will walk Speaker Pelosi’s plank by supporting her last-ditch healthcare push,” he said.
But in Pennsylvania, Obama sought the public’s help in pushing for a quick final vote in a Congress that has battled over the issue since last summer. “It’s time to make a decision,” he said. “The time for talk is over.”
The overhaul looked dead in January when Republicans deprived Democrats of their crucial 60th Senate vote by winning a Massachusetts special election, stopping negotiations to merge bills already passed by the House and Senate.
But changes to the Senate bill sought by Obama and House Democrats will be considered separately using a procedure that allows a simple majority vote in the 100-member Senate rather than the 60 votes needed to clear Republican procedural hurdles.
Obama proposed revisions to the Senate bill last week to ease the concerns of House Democrats. The changes included watering down a tax on expensive insurance plans and boosting federal subsidies to make coverage more affordable.
In her letter, Sebelius asked the insurance executives to post on their websites the justification for any individual or small group rate increases they implemented or proposed in 2010, and continue to do so in the future.
The heads of Cigna Corp, UnitedHealth Group Inc and privately held Health Care Service Corp also received the letter.
Health insurer shares were down in morning trading. The Morgan Stanley Healthcare Payor index was down about 0.4 percent at midday and the S&P Managed Health Care index was off nearly 1 percent.
The CEO of Manpower, a global employment services company that provides temporary workers, said the uncertainty of the healthcare debate in Washington was keeping U.S. employers from hiring.
“The concern is that we have is a political system that is broken to fix systemic issues,” CEO Jeff Joerres told Reuters.
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