Health care group blasts industry
Posted: Monday, July 21, 2008 1:08 PM by Domenico Montanaro
From NBC’s Alex Wall
Members of Health Care for America Now criticized the health insurance industry’s impending launch of “Campaign for an American Solution” tomorrow in Columbus, Ohio, and contrasted it with their own campaign launch two weeks ago, in a conference call this morning.
The group’s President Richard Kirsch said in a conference call that America’s Health Insurance Plans is trying to fight healthcare reform by launching a “listening tour” in Columbus that identifies the “few customers that are satisfied with their health insurance.”
Kirsch called his group’s campaign a “coalition that represents literally millions of Americans who have come together for quality affordable health care for all”, and cited the groups’ 52 launch sites across the country to illustrate HCAN’s national scale.
On Ohio’s healthcare woes: Kirsch went on to illustrate the discrepancies between increases in wages and health care costs for Ohioans. According to Kirsch, family health insurance premiums for Ohio’s workers rose 8.4 times more quickly than workers’ paychecks between 2000 and 2006. He then argued that, “[we] can’t count on the health insurance companies to fix this mess”, citing that between 2003 and 2007, Community Health Insurance’s (the Ohio subsidiary of WellPoint) profits more than doubled.
Kirsch criticized the Ohio State Legislature for “not doing much to protect Ohioans’ healthcare.” According to Kirsch, the health insurance industry is “free to reject who they want” and charges unfairly based on risk. “If you’re older you get charged more,” Kirsch said. “If you’re a woman you get charged more.”
Brian Rothenberg, the Executive Director of Progress Ohio, railed against the lack of progress in healthcare reform despite the fact that “it’s been 16 years since the healthcare debate first came on the national scene.” He said that many people are “one bad boss, one difficult decision at work away from being unemployed and having no health insurance.”
Rothenberg went on to criticize the health insurance industry for being hypocritical when it comes to government intervention in healthcare.
“Just like in the case of big oil, what [health insurance companies] are trying to do is only fix [the problem] in pieces,” Rothenberg said. “They would take the greater costs and put them on the government, the same government that they want to stay out of [the industry].”
