Health insurance companies naturally have been added to the administration’s list of villains. But there is a slight problem, as ABC’s Z. Byron Wolf points out. The very same insurance companies have backed the administration’s attempt to nationalize American health care because doing so would result in the sale of millions more insurance policies!
President Obama and Democrats launched a campaign to vilify insurance companies in the final stretch of their health reform effort.
Republicans, meanwhile, pointed out that those very same insurance companies would get huge checks from the government if health reform is enacted.
“(Health Insurers) will keep on doing this for as long as they can get away with it. This is no secret,” the president said. “They’re telling their investors this – ‘We are in the money. We are going to keep on making big profits even though a lot of folks are going to be put under hardship,'” the President told supporters at a stop in Pennsylvania today.
HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, meanwhile, wrote to insurance company executives demanding that they justify premium hikes.
Neither mentioned that the Senate health reform bill, which is the basis for Democrats’ last best chance at comprehensive reform, would give the insurance companies millions of new customers required by law to buy health insurance. It would also require insurers to cover everyone, regardless of age, gender or pre-existing condition.
To help pay for the new insurance requirements the government would give to people money to buy insurance – $336 billion over the next ten years. That money, ultimately, would have to go to… drum roll… insurance companies.
It may be a bit late, but perhaps the insurers–along with the drugmakers and doctors, whose trade associations also backed the Democrats’ bills–will finally realize that their newfound friends are only too ready to turn on them whenever convenient.
