Meow! Hillary Tees off over a question that turned out to be wrongly translated.
Oh No Nothing Wrong With This
Mark Warner’s Research Department
UnitedHealth has periodically served as a valuable extension of Warner’s office, providing research and analysis to support his initiatives. Corporations and trade groups play this role in all kinds of contexts, but few do it with the effectiveness of the insurers. In June, Warner introduced legislation expanding government-backed Medicare and Medicaid coverage for hospice stays for the terminally ill and other treatment in life’s final stages. The issue isn’t a top UnitedHealth priority. But the corporation wanted to help Warner with his argument that in the long run, better hospice coverage would save money. UnitedHealth prepared a report for lawmakers finding that 27% of Medicare’s budget is now spent during the last year of older patients’ lives, often on questionable hospital tests and procedures. Expanded hospice coverage and other services could save $18 billion over 10 years, UnitedHealth asserted.
When Warner went to the Senate floor on June 15 to offer his bill, he cited those exact figures. He thanked the company for its support and put a letter from UnitedHealth applauding him in the Congressional Record.
Objectivity eh? How can one use data from one side of the debate? No matter what the Lewin Group says about being totally independent of their overlords, UnitedHealth, they aren’t. Just look at NBC putting their parent company’s interests ahead of real journalism, no one can be fully independent when they are owned by another. That other in this case does things like
The company has repeatedly hit smaller employers and consumers with double-digit rate hikes in recent years, far greater than the overall rate of inflation. An investigation last year by New York’s Attorney General will force the company to stop running two huge databases used widely within the insurance industry. By allegedly setting medical reimbursements too low—that is, skewing statistics in favor of insurers by understating “usual and customary” physician fees—the databases had resulted in the overcharging of consumers by billions of dollars nationwide. In January, UnitedHealth agreed to resolve the situation by paying $400 million in a pair of agreements with the New York Attorney General and the American Medical Assn., although it didn’t admit any wrongdoing.
In a separate case last year, UnitedHealth was forced to stop selling “limited benefit” plans with capped payouts under the imprimatur of the senior citizen group AARP. It turned out that the policies provided very modest coverage, catching many customers off guard, according to Senator Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), who helped bring the practice to light. Grassley pointed out that UnitedHealth paid as little as $5,000 toward surgery costing several times as much.
Granted it isn’t only Blue Dogs and Republicans getting rich off the health care industry in this debate. $80 million and promises of support is enough to get the President to back down on campaign promises.
The lesson here is that politicians like Obama and Democrats will say and do anything to get elected, but throw a few million in campaign coffers and they change their tones drastically. 17 million voters voted for Change we could believe in, in the end we got a big ole’ heaping of Same Old Shit.
