As Congress nears votes on legislation that would overhaul the health care system, many small businesses say they are facing the steepest rise in insurance premiums they have seen in recent years.
Insurance brokers and benefits consultants say their small business clients are seeing premiums go up an average of about 15 percent for the coming year — double the rate of last year’s increases. That would mean an annual premium that was $4,500 per employee in 2008 and $4,800 this year would rise to $5,500 in 2010.
Higher medical costs aside, some experts say they think the insurance industry, under pressure from Wall Street, is raising premiums to get ahead of any legislative changes that might reduce their profits. More…
The White House is concentrating on winning Senate votes to pass health reform with a public option, a spokesman said Friday.
As questions swirl about the number of votes in the House for several versions of the public option, varying in strength, Deputy White House Secretary Bill Burton said that President Barack Obama is working on votes in the Senate.
“I will say that the president continues to think that the public option is the best way to achieve choice and competition, and that’s what he’s working toward,” Burton said during a press gaggle on Air Force One this morning.
“We’re working on getting healthcare reform done, and in order to do that, obviously you’re going to need some votes in the United States Senate to move it forward, and that’s what we’re working on,” Burton added.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) called an emergency meeting of House Democrats this morning to emphasize that she had not lost the votes for a “robust” public option, contrary to reports this morning. More…
The Senate approves the measure, 68 to 29, and Obama is expected to sign it. The legislation, previously passed by the House, is named for Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr.
Reporting from Washington – A bill to make violence against gays and lesbians a federal hate crime cleared the Senate on Thursday and headed to the White House. The 68-29 vote was a victory for civil rights groups that have long sought to expand the federal statute beyond attacks motivated by religion, race, color or national origin. The bill, which President Obama is expected to sign, includes penalties for assaults based on a victim’s sexual orientation, gender, disability or gender identity.
Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr., whose Justice Department would be charged with enforcing the provisions, praised the bill’s passage. “There have been nearly 80,000 hate-crime incidents reported to the FBI since I first testified before Congress in support of a hate-crimes bill 11 years ago,” Holder said.
Recent incidents — such as the June shooting death of an African American security guard at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum by a white supremacist — “demonstrate that there are still those for whom prejudice can translate into violence,” he said. More…
The House Judiciary Committee voted Wednesday to strip federal antitrust protections shielding health insurers from investigations into price fixing and other business practices, the first step in a legislative bid to clamp down on the much-maligned industry.
Although Democrats have led the repeal push in recent weeks, the committee’s 20-9 vote came with the support of three Republicans. The legislation would repeal portions of the 1945 McCarran-Ferguson Act that allows states to regulate health insurance providers without federal intervention. But critics of the law say that 64 years after its passage, the result has been regional monopolies that inflate premiums and discriminate against people based on their health status, gender and other factors. More…
In our view, both insurance & banking should lose their McCarran Act exemptions. Anti-competitive, anti-consumer practices are widespread in predatory lending, automobile & life insurance, homeowner’s insurance (Katrina!) and credit card practices.
KABUL – U.N.-backed fraud investigators on Monday threw out nearly a third of President Hamid Karzai’s votes from the August election, undercutting his claim of victory and stepping up the pressure for him to accept a runoff.
The Obama administration has been holding off on a decision to send more troops to Afghanistan until a credible government is installed in Kabul.
Both Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and the U.N. secretary general signaled on Monday that a resolution was near.
Clinton said Karzai planned to announce his intentions on Tuesday, adding that she was “encouraged at the direction the situation is moving.” More…
WASHINGTON — President Obama mounted a frontal assault on the insurance industry on Saturday, accusing it of airing “deceptive and dishonest ads” to derail his health care legislation and threatening to strip the industry of its longstanding exemption from federal anti-trust laws.
In unusually harsh terms, Mr. Obama cast insurance companies as obstacles to change interested only in preserving their own “profits and bonuses” and willing to “bend the truth or break it” to stop his drive to remake the nation’s health care system. The president used his weekly radio and Internet address to push back against industry assertions that legislation will drive up premiums.
“It’s smoke and mirrors,” Mr. Obama said. “It’s bogus. And it’s all too familiar. Every time we get close to passing reform, the insurance companies produce these phony studies as a prescription and say, ‘Take one of these, and call us in a decade.’ Well, not this time.”
By RICARDO ALONSO-ZALDIVAR
WASHINGTON – Fears about high costs of the health care overhaul and mistrust of insurers are rekindling interest in letting the government sell health insurance as part of the plan. The leading congressional proposal as of Wednesday — a Senate Finance bill that relies on private coverage with no new government plan — could price out some 17 million Americans.
And the insurance industry may have unwittingly helped the case for public coverage with a report over the weekend asserting the Finance bill would raise premiums for everyone.
Business groups and conservatives remain steadfastly opposed to government insurance — formidable political opposition that shows no sign of weakening. So advocates are getting creative, trying to reformulate the “public option” in a way that can gain the 60 votes needed to clear the Senate.
Instead of an all-or-nothing approach, they’re trying to provide choices.
What if each state could decide whether to offer public coverage instead of having it decreed from Washington — as proposed by Sen. Tom Carper, D-Del.?
What if states had a menu of options, from nonprofit co-ops to using their own employee health plans? More…
70% of the public wants health reform. 60% of physicians want health reform. Endorsed by the American Medical Association. U.S. hospital associations have endorsed it and even pharmaceutical companies recognize the need. The last and final enemy of reform is the insurance companies.
Events of the past 24 hours seen as boosting chances of real reform.
Now they have an enemy. For months, President Obama and his administration waged their fight for a health-care overhaul without a clear opponent, even courting the industry executives and interest groups that helped kill reform efforts 15 years ago.
But attacks on the leading Democratic reform plan this week by the insurance lobby left little doubt that two of the most powerful institutions involved in the debate — the White House and the nation’s insurance companies — have abandoned any real hope of forging a compromise. What was a tenuous truce has turned quickly into an all-out battle, with both sides ratcheting up the hostilities.
As the Senate Finance Committee on Tuesday approved a 10-year, $829 billion bill to remake the health-care system, Obama’s top advisers and the insurers moved into a more intense stage of conflict.
“The insurance industry has decided to lead the charge against health reform, and everyone recognizes their motives: profits,” said White House deputy communications director Dan Pfeiffer. “We are going to make sure they can’t sink this effort at the last minute.”
Pfeiffer castigated the industry for releasing a report Monday that concluded that the finance panel’s bill would increase costs for consumers. “They made themselves a very good foil,” he said.
The insurers, however, showed no sign of being chastened. America’s Health Insurance Plans, an industry trade group, opened a fresh line of attack with a multistate advertising campaign warning that senior citizens enrolled in private Medicare plans could lose benefits under the legislation. More…
