Not Healthy to Trust Anti-trust

In a must-read NYT piece Mr. Robert Reich points out the anti-trust protection that the health insurance industry enjoys.

Interesting note from Health Care for America Now...Executives and shareholders of the fivebiggest for-profit health insurers, UnitedHealthGroup Inc., WellPoint Inc., Aetna Inc., HumanaInc., and Cigna Corp., enjoyed combined profitof $12.2 billion in 2009, up 56 percent from theprevious year. It was the best year ever for Big Insurance.

Op-Ed Contributor - Bust the Health Care Trusts - NYTimes.com: "Astonishingly, the health insurance industry is exempt from federal antitrust laws, which is why a handful of insurers have become so dominant in their markets that their customers simply have nowhere else to go. But that protection could soon end: President Obama on Tuesday announced his support of a House bill that would repeal health insurers’ antitrust exemption, and Speaker Nancy Pelosi signaled that she would put it toward an immediate vote...

With size has come not only market power but political clout. Big for-profit insurers deploy enough campaign money and lobbyists to get their way with state legislators and insurance commissioners. A proposal last year to allow California’s Department of Insurance to regulate rates, for example, died in committee. These companies have even been known to press states to limit how many other health insurers they license.

And when they can’t get their way, insurers go to court. In Maine — one state that aggressively regulates rates — WellPoint’s Anthem subsidiary has sued the insurance superintendent for reducing its requested rate increase.

Political clout can be especially advantageous at the federal level, as the big Wall Street banks have so brazenly demonstrated. Over the past two and a half years, WellPoint’s employees and associates have contributed more than $922,000 to federal political campaigns, and the company has spent $7.8 million lobbying Washington policymakers, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. It should not be surprising that WellPoint was one of the leading opponents of the public insurance option, which would have subjected it to competition even where it had sewn up the market..."