Administration Continues Attack on Health Insurers
In the administration's toughest message to date to the nation's health insurance companies, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius (at middle in the photo at left) is demanding they give Americans a break on the cost of health care coverage.
She wants them to take the millions of dollars they have set aside for ads against health care reform legislation "and use them to start giving Americans some relief from their skyrocketing premiums."
In remarks prepared for delivery to America's Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), the national association representing nearly 1300 health insurance companies, Sebelius will urge them to "give up some short-term profits" and help "create a sustainable health insurance market where all Americans will be able to buy coverage."
"That's better for the American people and it could be better for insurance companies too," Sebelius says in excerpts from the text of her remarks, distributed in advance by the White House.
She will appeal to their conscience asking them to imagine how folks in Illinois might feel to see profits for major insurance companies went up 56 percent last year "only to get a letter the next day saying their premiums are going up by double digits."
"Can you blame them for thinking the system's broken when their health insurance - which is supposed to protect them from exorbitant health costs - still forces them to pay thousands of dollars out of their pocket each year?"
Sebelius' blunt message comes on the same day President Obama will be delivering yet another pitch for enactment of health care reform legislation.
In a speech this afternoon in St. Charles, Mo., Mr. Obama will again make the case - as he did Monday in Glenside, Pa. - that regardless of the politics, health care reform "is the right thing to do."
He will also announce a new effort to crack down on waste and fraud in Medicare, Medicaid and other government health care plans.
He will sign a memorandum to all federal departments and agencies to expand "payment recapture audits" of health care programs. That means hiring outside examiners to audit the spending by health care programs in search of waste and abuse. The examiners get to keep a portion of any abuses they detect. Bounty auditors, if you will.
The White House estimates that the program could return at least $2 billion over the next three years to the government treasury. It sounds like a worthwhile sum, but it amounts to less than 1/10th of 1 percent of the over $2 trillion the government will spend on Medicare and Medicaid over the next three years.
Today's health care speech by Mr. Obama will be the 52nd he has delivered over the last year out of 463 speeches and remarks he has given since taking office.
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