Weekly Address: Taking the Insurance Companies on Down the Stretch

Run time: 06:06 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mqXgp5mWU00   Posted on YouTube: October 17, 2009 By YouTube Member: Views on YouTube: 0   Posted on DU: October 17, 2009 By DU Member: cal04 Views on DU: 396

 
WEEKLY ADDRESS: President Obama Calls Hails Progress on Health Insurance Reform Despite Defenders of the Status Quo
(snip)
Of course, like clockwork, we’ve seen folks on cable television who know better, waving these industry-funded studies in the air. We’ve seen industry insiders – and their apologists – citing these studies as proof of claims that just aren’t true. They’ll claim that premiums will go up under reform; but they know that the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office found that reforms will lower premiums in a new insurance exchange while offering consumer protections that will limit out-of-pocket costs and prevent discrimination based on pre-existing conditions. They’ll claim that you’ll have to pay more out of pocket; but they know that this is based on a study that willfully ignores whole sections of the bill, including tax credits and cost savings that will greatly benefit middle class families. Even the authors of one of these studies have now admitted publicly that the insurance companies actually asked them to do an incomplete job.

It’s smoke and mirrors. 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. The fact is, the insurance industry is making this last-ditch effort to stop reform even as costs continue to rise and our health care dollars continue to be poured into their profits, bonuses, and administrative costs that do nothing to make us healthy – that often actually go toward figuring out how to avoid covering people. And they’re earning these profits and bonuses while enjoying a privileged exception from our anti-trust laws, a matter that Congress is rightfully reviewing.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/Weekly-Address-President-Obama-Calls-Hails-Progress-on-Health-Insurance-Reform-Despite-Defenders-of-the-Status-Quo/

Do you think Karen Ignagni heard that anti trust exemption comment?

The President's words are very eloquent and powerful when he talks about the "big change" that we can accomplish if we stand up against the special interests.

But the version of HCR that he promotes in the very same address is the Baucus bill, which is not "big change" that stands up against the special interests at all. On the contrary, the Baucus bill would require us all, by law, to write a check every month to those special interests and it doesn't include anything that will keep them from continuing to suck out a huge percentage of the US economy and use it to buy off our representatives and to own and run our country.

I guess I can hope that this is still more "rope-a-dope" and that the knock-out barrage is yet to come, but I don't know how long I can sustain that hope. Let's get on with it, shall we?

They know it and he knows it.