Who’s Leading the Fight Against Health Care Reform

Sometimes it's hard to tell who the players really are. 

Recently, an unlikely group of health care interests met with President Obama and expressed strong support for health care reform. The lobbying associations of the health care insurers, drug companies and hospital industry groups pledged to "do our part" in reducing health care costs.

Sounds good so far, right? But this same group of health care industry interests is leading the fight against a public plan option, against using government purchasing power to bring down drug costs and against quality, comprehensive coverage for working people.

America's Health Insurance Plans is the trade association for health insurance companies. In its health reform proposal, there are some points that are reasonable: the need for universal coverage, for example.

But AHIP's plan ignores some of the worst abuses of the industry: charging higher rates based on age, selling coverage that doesn't cover normal medical expenses, spending about a third of every premium dollar on overhead, not health care, and paying huge multi-million dollar salaries and bonuses to CEOs.

AHIP wants health care reform as long as it is run exclusively through insurance companies. In fact, after President Obama announced that the organizations had pledged to voluntarily reduce the industry's health care costs by 1.5 percent a year or $2 trillion over the next 10 years, the hospital and the insurance lobbies said that was a misunderstanding, that no such commitment had been made.

The plan by the health care industry is to "scare the hell out of Americans" when it comes to health care reform, said Robert Borosage of the Campaign for America's Future.  

Several fake front groups — including Americans for Prosperity and Conservatives for Patients' Rights — already are on the air with television ads that spotlight the "horrors" of "a government-run" health care system, and more are in the works by other industry groups. The head of Conservatives for Patients' Rights is Rick Scott, the former head of Columbia/HCA, the for-profit hospital corporation, who was forced to resign during a federal investigation of his company for fraud and charges of overbilling Medicare and Medicaid. The suit ended in a $1.7 billion settlement, the largest in U.S. history.