If you have the health care industry complaining that we’re going to raise costs because of these changes, it is them putting us on notice that we haven’t put enough cost containment in the bill. You know, the health care industry themselves is
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putting out a whole report saying that. That should be a tell to the Baucus team that you know what, maybe it’s time for them to go back and revisit the public option.
In a strange way, and look, obviously they didn’t mean this, the health insurance lobby today fired the most important salvo in weeks for the public option, because they have said, as clear as day, left to their own devices, according to their own number crunchers, they’re going to raise rates 111%. And that’s why, you know we have a petittion at CountdownToHealthCare.com where we’re telling people for the moderates in the Senate, the so-called moderates, and for the White House, we need the public option, and the health care industry is making our argument for us.
From DailyKos:
Left to their own devices, the industry raised rates 119 percent in the last decade, soo 111% in the next is right on course.
As Rep. Weiner says, adequate cost containment just isn’t in the Baucus bill, and while the last thing–the very last thing AHIP wants is a public option, they make a damned good argument for it by commissioning this report. That argument is the substantive one Weiner is making about cost containment, but also a political one. They’ve just shown that, despite all the cozy meetings early on with White House officials and the Baucus team, that they are intrinsically opposed to reform and they’ll do anything to kill it.
So now that AHIP has betrayed their true selves, maybe we can get a real push from the White House and the Senate leadership for real reform, and a robust public option.
Come on. What did we expect? If I did a study looking at the pay of 48 year old, black trauma surgeons, in North Carolina, I would find that they need more money and that hospitals (even those I don’t work at) should increase the salary of this disadvantaged 1000 fold. The insurance industry did the same thing.
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