Wendell Potter's Blog, page 12

Health Insurers Working the System to Pad Their Profits

Taking advantage of Medicare Advantage. One of the reasons the health insurance industry worked behind the scenes in 2009 and 2010 to derail Obamacare was the fear that changes mandated by the law would cut their Medicare Advantage profits. Medicare Advantage plans are federally funded but privately run alternatives to traditional fee-for-service Medicare. Although the […]

Candidates Without a Clue

GOP contenders hate Obamacare but don’t have an alternative and know nothing about health insurance. If folks who watched Thursday night’s Republican presidential debate were expecting the candidates to tell us what they’d do to replace Obamacare if they could get rid of it, those folks would have been disappointed. In fact, the 10 candidates […]

Privatizing Medicare Would Create More Problems Than it Solves

Elderly health program was created 50 years ago for a reason. Republicans have long dreamed of finding a way to either privatize or get rid of Medicare, a program that has provided access to health care for well over 100 million Americans since it was created in 1965. As presidential candidate and former Florida Governor […]

Priceless Safety Net Reaches Golden Anniversary

Medicare’s impressive milestone is reason to celebrate the safety net and time for supporters to wake up to threat of increased privatization. Happy birthday, Medicare! Happy Golden Anniversary! If you’re just a few decades old, you might be surprised to learn that Medicare, the publicly financed health insurance program for America’s senior (65 and older) […]

Latest Swing of Revolving Door Puts Former Medicare Czar in Charge of Health Insurance Lobby

Tavenner appointment reveals that insurers will continue to chase federal money. Washington’s notorious revolving door was in full swing again last week as the health insurance industry snagged another top federal official to help it get what it wants out of lawmakers and regulators. America’s Health Insurance Plans, the industry’s biggest lobbying and PR group, […]

GOP Myth: Obamacare is Driving Insurance Mergers

Other factors are fueling the proposed Aetna-Humana and Anthem-Cigna marriages. Republican lawmakers and their friends in Washington’s conservative think tanks have put forth another reason Americans should hate Obamacare: it’s making the country’s biggest insurance companies gobble each other up. If the recently announced deals actually happen, they say, we’ll have fewer insurance choices. When […]

Coming Health Insurance Mergers Will Cost Consumers

Talk of ‘eliminating redundancies’ really means layoffs. The number of health insurers competing for your business almost certainly will decrease in coming months as the big for-profit firms merge or acquire each other.  The companies insist that the results will enable them to operate more efficiently  through the elimination of redundancies. But don’t expect your […]

Thank You, Justice Roberts, For Saving Our Butts

If House Speaker John Boehner decided to express his gratitude for the King v. Burwell ruling – and he should – it might sound like this. In the Supreme Court’s ruling Thursday, Chief Justice John Roberts provided a truthful assessment of what would happen to the health insurance marketplace if the requirement to purchase insurance […]

Insurers’ Arguments Key to Supreme Court Decision

Upholding Obamacare only way to avoid ‘death spiral.‘ It is clear from both the first paragraph and closing comments in the Supreme Court’s decision upholding Obamacare subsidies that the justices listened more closely to the insurance industry than perhaps any other party. In an amicus brief it filed with the court in King v. Burwell, […]

Industry Lobbies Hard to Snuff Out Tax on Medical Devices

Funds go to support Affordable Health Care Act. If there ever was a piece of legislation influenced by campaign contributions and lobbyists, the bill to repeal a 2.3 percent excise tax on medical device manufacturers, which the House passed last Thursday, would be it. Forty-six Democrats joined 234 Republicans to repeal the tax, which was […]