Another Bogus Report
Every time we’re about to take a critical step on the road to passing health insurance reform, opponents of reform release another bogus report in a last-ditch effort to scramble progress.
In mid-October, just days before the Senate Finance Committee voted to pass reform legislation, Blue Cross Blue Shield and America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP) released self-serving reports that falsely claimed health reform would increase costs for American families. PricewaterhouseCoopers, the firm retained by AHIP to write the report, undermined the credibility of their own work when it issued a public statement admitting they had produced a skewed analysis of only part of the bill because that is what the insurance industry paid them to do.
Now, as the Senate prepares to take up health insurance reform legislation, opponents of reform are at it again.
This morning the Washington Post reported that the Chamber of Commerce is proposing to spend $50,000 to hire a “respected economist” to write a report that would buttress the thoroughly debunked insurance industry claim that health reform would be harmful to the economy. Here it comes: another bogus report with a self-serving outcome that’s so flawed its hard to take seriously.
According to the Post:
Step two, according to the e-mail, appears to assume the outcome of the economic review: "The economist will then circulate a sign-on letter to hundreds of other economists saying that the bill will kill jobs and hurt the economy. We will then be able to use this Buy cheap Cialis Online open letter to produce advertisements, and as a powerful lobbying and grass-roots document."
Opponents of reform won’t let the facts get in the way of their efforts to defend to a status quo that has been so profitable for the insurance companies.
Last week, the Business Roundtable – which represents the chief executives of major U.S. companies – released a report showing that by 2019, large employers will spend $28,530 on health care costs per employee. With the cost containment measures included in health reform legislation, those same large employers stand to save $3,000 per employee. And an analysis by MIT Economist Jon Gruber determined that reform will save about 80,000 jobs in the small business sector over the next decade.