MIKE TIPPING: Insurers' contributions skewed to supporters of health care law
Mike Tipping
Over the past several years, the Anthem insurance company has given tens of thousands of dollars to candidates for the Maine Legislature and their political action committees.
For most of that time, their contributions have been relatively equal between Democrats and Republicans.
According to a new report set to be released later today by Maine Citizens for Clean Elections, however, that bipartisanship changed in 2010.
Starting before the elections that year and continuing through today, Anthem's contributions are now heavily tilted toward one party. Where before Republicans received around 50 percent, they now receive 84 percent of all contributions from the insurance giant.
Maine Citizens for Clean Elections ties this change directly to Republican support for LD 1333, now Public Law 90, the health insurance legislation that repealed key regulatory safeguards in the insurance market. It also allows Anthem and other insurance companies to charge greatly increased premiums to businesses and individuals across the state based on factors such as geography and age.
The report tracks almost $500,000 spent by the insurance industry to influence elections in Maine, but this total actually barely scrapes the surface of its influence. As Maine Citizens for Clean Elections notes, individuals and organizations that registered to lobby on this bill also gave an additional $936,328 in 2011 alone to candidates and PACs.
Then there are the national groups and Super PACs. Anthem's corporate owner, Wellpoint, gave more than $800,000 to the Republican State Leadership Council, a group founded by Karl Rove. The Leadership Council spent $400,000 on five key Senate races in Maine in 2010 that shifted the balance of power in the Legislature.
People often are shocked when they hear about how bad the health care situation has become for some small businesses since the passage of the insurance industry-backed legislation.
Doctor Visits Dropping, New Census Figures Show
By SABRINA TAVERNISE
WASHINGTON — Americans of working age are going to the doctor less frequently than they were 10 years ago, according to a new report by the Census Bureau.
In 2010, people age 18 to 64 made an average of 3.9 visits to doctors, nurses and other medical professionals, down from 4.8 visits in 2001, said the report, which was released on Monday.
The precise reasons for the decline were unclear, said Brett O’Hara, an official at the Census Bureau and a co-author of the report. But the changing demographics of the American population most likely had something to do with it.
As baby boomers retire, for example, they leave a working-age population that is on average younger and that tends to use less health care. Still, that is likely to be only a small part of the explanation, as the baby boomers began to move into retirement only at the end of the report’s period, about two years ago.
Why Let the Rich Hoard All the Toys?
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Imagine a kindergarten with 100 students, lavishly supplied with books, crayons and toys.
Yet you gasp: one avaricious little boy is jealously guarding a mountain of toys for himself. A handful of other children are quietly playing with a few toys each, while 90 of the children are looking on forlornly — empty-handed.
The one greedy boy has hoarded more toys than all those 90 children put together!
“What’s going on?” you ask. “Let’s learn to share! One child shouldn’t hog everything for himself!”
The greedy little boy looks at you, indignant. “Do you believe in redistribution?” he asks suspiciously, his lips curling in contempt. “I don’t want to share. This is America!”
And then he summons his private security firm and has you dragged off the premises. Well, maybe not, but you get the point.
That kindergarten distribution is precisely what America looks like. Our wealth has become so skewed that the top 1 percent possesses a greater collective worth than the entire bottom 90 percent, according to the Economic Policy Institute in Washington.
This inequality is a central challenge for the United States today and should be getting far more attention in this presidential campaign. A few snapshots:
• The six heirs of Sam Walton, the founder of Walmart, own as much wealth as the bottom 100 million Americans.
• In 2010, 93 percent of the gain in national income went to the top 1 percent.
• America’s Gini coefficient, the classic measure of inequality, set a modern record last month — the highest since the Great Depression.
This dismal ground is explored in an important and smart new book, “The Price of Inequality,” by Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel laureate who was chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Bill Clinton. It’s a searing read.
Health Care Spending Trends:
Medicare and Private Health Insurance
Lee Goldberg and Sabiha Zainulbhai
Slowing the growth of health care spending continues to be a major domestic policy challenge. In 2010, total U.S. health expenditures reached $2.6 trillion – 18 percent of gross domestic product (GDP).1 Although health care spending has slowed in recent years, it is projected to grow faster than GDP over the next decade.2 Medicare, the nation’s largest health insurance program, accounts for one in five health care dollars, and in 2010 accounted for 15.1 percent of the federal budget – a figure that is expected to reach 17.4 percent by 2020.3,4
There are many drivers of national health care spending, ranging from rising prices for medical services and increasing reliance on new and more expensive medical technologies to our growing elderly population and imperfections in the market for medical goods and services. While per capita spending for both Medicare and private health insurance has increased in recent years, Medicare’s costs appear to have grown more slowly, according to national health expenditure data compiled by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ (CMS) (Figure 1).5 The data indicate that Medicare expenditures since the enactment of the Balanced Budget Act of 19976 have grown by an annual average of 4.1 percent, compared to 6.4 percent for private health insurance.
http://www.nasi.org/sites/default/files/research/Healthcare_Spending_Trends.pdf?
Especially damaging is a graph contained in the report showing a shift in contributions by Anthem in 2010, from supporting both parties to putting all their money behind Republicans.
CommonDreams.org, Oct. 3, 2012
A recently released Census Bureau report reveals that 48.6 million Americans lack health insurance.
We know that being uninsured is dangerous to your physical and fiscal health. Research has shown that for every million uninsured, 1,000 preventable deaths occur due to untreated or undiagnosed illness.
This means 48,000 Americans will die needless deaths this year. To put this in perspective, that’s about the same number of U.S. combat deaths in Vietnam War over a decade.
President Obama and the Democrats fought to get the Affordable Care Act (ACA) passed. This was a remarkable political achievement. For 100 years, American presidents have tried to achieve health system reform. The last significant achievement was the passage of Medicare in 1965. Since then political deadlock has allowed only minor tinkering.
Sadly, the ACA is not remarkable as a policy success. Reform should have been modeled on our successful Medicare program. Instead, the ACA was modeled on the reforms passed by Mitt Romney in Massachusetts.
Massachusetts did expand coverage, as will the ACA, but the Bay State’s reforms, which rely on subsidies for the mandatory purchase of private insurance, have left 200,000 people uninsured to this day, six years later. Costs in Massachusetts have soared and continue to be the highest per capita in the world.
Fully implemented, the ACA will still leave 30 million uninsured in 2022, according to the Congressional Budget Office. That figure may climb even higher if more states decide to turn down federal Medicaid dollars, which several governors have said they may do.
But assuming all goes ahead as planned, 10 years from now we will still see about 30,000 of our friends, neighbors and family members die avoidable deaths from lack of coverage.
http://www.pnhp.org/print/news/2012/october/worse-than-war-deaths-from-uninsurance
Slowing the growth of health care spending continues to be a major domestic policy challenge. In 2010, total U.S. health expenditures reached $2.6 trillion – 18 percent of gross domestic product (GDP).1 Although health care spending has slowed in recent years, it is projected to grow faster than GDP over the next decade.2 Medicare, the nation’s largest health insurance program, accounts for one in five health care dollars, and in 2010 accounted for 15.1 percent of the federal budget – a figure that is expected to reach 17.4 percent by 2020.3,4
There are many drivers of national health care spending, ranging from rising prices for medical services and increasing reliance on new and more expensive medical technologies to our growing elderly population and imperfections in the market for medical goods and services. While per capita spending for both Medicare and private health insurance has increased in recent years, Medicare’s costs appear to have grown more slowly, according to national health expenditure data compiled by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ (CMS) (Figure 1).5 The data indicate that Medicare expenditures since the enactment of the Balanced Budget Act of 19976 have grown by an annual average of 4.1 percent, compared to 6.4 percent for private health insurance.
http://www.nasi.org/sites/default/files/research/Healthcare_Spending_Trends.pdf?
Another View: House speaker wrong to trash single-payer health program
Just as seniors appreciate Medicare, younger people would benefit from a similar plan.
By RICHARD C. DILLIHUNT, M.D.
In a recent op-ed, Robert Nutting, speaker of the Maine House, warns of dire consequences if the Democrats regain control of the Legislature (Maine Voices, "Democrats want to undo progress in Augusta," Sept. 13).
Related headlines
Bragging about Republican leadership, he addresses several important issues in a piecemeal fashion. It is difficult to see how the last few years have accomplished anything of note except for calling attention to bizarre, embarrassing behavior.
The speaker's words are a cornucopia of falsehoods, the worse of which comes in his incredible claim that if the Democrats took back control of the Legislature, they would repeal the laws the Republicans "rammed through" on a party-line vote, and "we would return on a path to single-payer, inefficient, government-run health care."
Ramming legislation through on party-line voting in itself is irresponsible, especially when designed to stop a form of health care that our nation critically needs to turn our economy around. Let's set the record straight. Our government-run health care, known as Medicare, now covers about 50 million senior and disabled Americans and has an overhead cost of less than 5 percent while enjoying immense popularity.
Private for-profit insurers shouldering enormous executive compensation and stockholder demands are struggling to come in below the federally mandated 20 percent overhead rate. All other developed countries have adopted a single-payer or single-payer-like system, making health care a human right.
They cover all their residents and get better health results than we do. Their systems are far more popular with their voters than is ours, so much so that no politician who wants to stay in office dares to threaten to change them. And they do this at an average cost per person of about half of what we are spending.
Richard C. Dillihunt, M.D. is a resident of Portland.
Maine GOP Misleads on Insurance Rate Hikes
Yesterday, Maine Citizens for Clean Elections (MCCE) released a report on campaign spending by the insurance industry and their successful advocacy for LD 1333, now known as Public Law 90 or the rate hike bill. I wrote a column on it for the Kennebec Journal and Morning Sentinel.
Especially damaging is a graph contained in the report showing a shift in contributions by Anthem in 2010, from supporting both parties to putting all their money behind Republicans.Worse Than War: Deaths from Uninsurance
'We're not done with health care reform yet'
By Johnathon Ross, M.D.CommonDreams.org, Oct. 3, 2012
A recently released Census Bureau report reveals that 48.6 million Americans lack health insurance.
We know that being uninsured is dangerous to your physical and fiscal health. Research has shown that for every million uninsured, 1,000 preventable deaths occur due to untreated or undiagnosed illness.
This means 48,000 Americans will die needless deaths this year. To put this in perspective, that’s about the same number of U.S. combat deaths in Vietnam War over a decade.
President Obama and the Democrats fought to get the Affordable Care Act (ACA) passed. This was a remarkable political achievement. For 100 years, American presidents have tried to achieve health system reform. The last significant achievement was the passage of Medicare in 1965. Since then political deadlock has allowed only minor tinkering.
Sadly, the ACA is not remarkable as a policy success. Reform should have been modeled on our successful Medicare program. Instead, the ACA was modeled on the reforms passed by Mitt Romney in Massachusetts.
Massachusetts did expand coverage, as will the ACA, but the Bay State’s reforms, which rely on subsidies for the mandatory purchase of private insurance, have left 200,000 people uninsured to this day, six years later. Costs in Massachusetts have soared and continue to be the highest per capita in the world.
Fully implemented, the ACA will still leave 30 million uninsured in 2022, according to the Congressional Budget Office. That figure may climb even higher if more states decide to turn down federal Medicaid dollars, which several governors have said they may do.
But assuming all goes ahead as planned, 10 years from now we will still see about 30,000 of our friends, neighbors and family members die avoidable deaths from lack of coverage.
http://www.pnhp.org/print/news/2012/october/worse-than-war-deaths-from-uninsurance
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