Dems Get Religion on Health Care Antitrust Exemption

- Matt Taibbi -

MY health insurer here in California is Anthem Blue Cross. So far, my group policy hasn’t been affected by Anthem’s planned rate increase of as much as 39 percent for its customers with individual policies — but the trend worries me, as it should everyone. Rates are soaring all over the country. Insurers have been seeking to raise premiums 24 percent in Connecticut, 23 percent in Maine, 20 percent in Oregon and a wallet-popping 56 percent in Michigan. How can insurers raise prices as much as they want without fear of losing customers?

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.

via Op-Ed Contributor – Bust the Health Care Trusts – NYTimes.com.

This is how politics is supposed to work. Well, not really — in reality, you’d like to see your leaders actually lead, i.e. do the right thing first, before being forced into it by circumstance. But we’ll take the latter.

The sequence: Obama and the Dems got whipped in Massachusetts and it suddenly occurred to them that they might want to start doing things that would be popular outside their Rolodex of campaign contributors. A bailout tax was one early idea. They started searching the landscape for outrages they could get on the other side of and found a good one: Anthem Blue Cross in California raising rates by 39 percent.

Full Story: Dems Get Religion on Health Care Antitrust Exemption – Matt Taibbi – Taibblog – True/Slant.