Health Insurers Dispute Obama Claims

Considering they have been desperate to sit at the table with Obama, it must burn now that they have been turned into the bogeyman:

“We have momentum and I think we have more agreement than disagreement on critical issues” of ensuring the security and affordability of coverage, said Williams, whose company is based in Hartford, Connecticut.“There are other sectors whose profits dramatically exceed our modest profits,” Williams said.

Publicly traded insurers generated about $11 billion in net income in 2008 and nonprofit Blue Cross Blue Shield plans made less than $2 billion, said Carl McDonald, an Oppenheimer & Co. analyst in New York, in a July note issued when Democrats first raised the idea of industry fees.

Obama hasn’t given a fair portrait of the industry, or the true reasons for rising medical costs in the U.S., said Binns, the spokeswoman for Indianapolis-based WellPoint. UnitedHealth Group Inc., of Minnetonka, Minnesota, is the largest provider.“We disagree with the president’s continued mischaracterization of the health-care industry,” she said in an e-mail. “Health insurer profits account for less than 1 percent of every health-care dollar.”

‘Leading the Effort’

The industry has been “leading the effort to increase access to preventive services and wellness programs,” which Obama said will curb health spending, she said.We would have liked to hear more about policies to bend the trend,” Binns said. That would include changing the way doctors are reimbursed to focus on the quality of care, rather than the quantity of tests or procedures.

The American Medical Association applauded the president’s inclusion of medical-liability reform as a potential way to lower expenses.It “is something we’ve mentioned for years is a way to reduce unnecessary costs, as well as streamline health-care waste we have in our system,” said James Rohack, president of the Chicago-based AMA, in a telephone interview.

“Paying for the cost of this without adding a dime to the deficit means you’re going to have to eliminate unnecessary costs,” he said.Some estimates put the price of unneeded tests as high as 20 percent of overall health-care expenses, Rohack said. “If one can eliminate even half of that, you’re going to have a significant health savings,” he said.

As for the AMA, rhetoric that sounds good is hardly law and do not expect this Congress to enact any meaningful tort reform.