TODAY's Houston Chronicle editorial on Obamacare is the single most dishonest editorial I have ever seen in our local newspaper.
The Chronicle this week celebrated September 23, Day One of new Obamacare regulations that in the words of the Wall Street Journal, "annihilated a corner of the U.S. insurance market." For the Chronicle, however, any day with more regulations of business is a good day, hence this:
Sept. 23 was a good day for average Americans: It marked the implementation of the first substantial rulings [read regulations; rulings are what courts and other adjudicators issue] under the new health care provisions designed to help peple find adequate, affordable health insurance.
Among the first provisions, some of which take effect immediately, some in the next six months: Insurers cannot drop people when they get sick, cannot place lifetime caps on coverage and must provide affordable insurance for people uninsured due to pre-existing [read preexisting] conditions. Other benefits include free preventive care and partial closeing of the "donut hole" on costs of prescriptions for Medicare recipients.
But it wasn't a good day for thousands of children: One of the new provisions [read one new provision] prohibits discrimination against children with pre-existing [read preexisting] conditions. Several major insurance companies, after pledging to honor that provision, instead have chosen, just days before the deadline, to no longer offer child-only policies.
(Editorial, "Profit over principle: Insurers renege on promises to offer child-only policies mandated by health care law," Houston Chronicle, September 30, 2010 (emphasis added))
Good intentions, meet unintended consequences.
The insurance companies had two choices. One was to stay in business and raise premiums. The other was to quit the business and avoid the problem. Neither option is attractive, and neither would satisfy the Chronicle.
Instead of taking the business risk of pricing the additional coverage and the political risk of bearing the grief -- including, no doubt, grief from the Chronicle -- that higher premiums would attract. the companies simply dropped out of a niche market and reduced the scope of coverage they offer to the American public.
Good intentions, meet business reality. Government must destroy the business to save it.
But the Chronicle lack competence to address the issue directly. So it resorted to old standbys the editorial board's bag of tricks: slander. Another illustration that liberals think their ideological adversaries are not just dumb, but evil.
It's a wonder the headline wasn't, "Insurers lie; kids die."
How did the industry lie? According to the editors, insurers dropped the coverage "after pledging to honor that provision." In other words, they broke a promise.
What promise? The alleged proof comes in this paragraph:
As recently as last March, Karen Ignagni, president and CEO of America's Health Insurance Plans . . .
The first red flag is that the Chronicle didn't identify America's Health Insurance Plans. We're invited to assume it's an insurance company. It is, in fact, a trrade group. It lobbys.
Why is that important? Because trade groups don't run companies; companies run trade groups. And companies never let trade group lobbyists "pledge" in an offhanded letter to run their businesses one way or the other.
This is more than a question of legal authority; it's a signal that something is not right about any claim that the trade group had bound the health insurance industry, legally or morally, to sell child-only policies.
Continuing:
. . . wrote U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sibelius that the nation's health plans "recognize the significant hardship" of being unable to find coverage for a child with a pre-existing condition . . .
True enough. That's what the letter said, more or less. Of course it's a generalization, a truism. Moving on.
. . . that in 2008 they proposed reforms to abolish such exclusions . . .
That is half correct. AHIP in December 2008 -- with President-elect Obama days away from taking the oath of office -- signed on to guaranteed issue and individual mandate, core principles of Obamacare. Foolish, foolish, foolish, but done. In essence, the insurance industry volunteered to run a federalized health-care insurance system. Go here.
(By the way, the mechanism for making this commitment in 2008 was not a statement in a short letter by an AHIP lobbyist; it was a carefully written statement by the organization's board of directors, a gaggle of actual company executives. That's how it's done in the real world.)
But the key point here is that AHIP's plan to "abolish such exclusions" was a two-parter: We'll drop preexisting conditions if . . . if you will make everyone buy insurance.
And that hasn't happened yet for the child-only policies. The insurance companies were being ordered to take the bad half of the bargain and wait a few years for the good half.
No, thank you.
Continuing with the Chronicle's evidentiary showing on how the trade group allegedly lied:
. . . that they welcomed the change . . .
Now we've moved from a half-truth to a lie on steriods. AHIP most emphatically did not "welcome the change." What Ms. Ignagni wrote was, "We look forward to working with you on implementation and to minimize disruption for the 200 million people we serve."
"Look forward to working with you" is boilerplate. An enthusiastic person might write it. So might a highly regulated industry when communicating with a federal bureaucrat with the power to put them out of business. Ms. Ignagni was simply holding a place a the table in hopes, I imagine, that Ms. Sibelius might deign to listen to the industry's concerns.
As for the content: "on implementation" is all but meaningless. Obamacare had passed six days earlier. It was the law. It would, presumably, be implemented. Again, Ms. Ignagni is doing little more than trying to keep a seat at the table for the regulation-writing that lay ahead.
"To minimize disruption for the 200 people we serve" is a generalization, not a promise to do any specific thing. A lefty might hear a promise not to quit selling new child-only policies, but a more reasonable interpretation is that the trade group still hoped Ms. Sibelius would still find a way to force people to buy the policies, thereby minimizing disruption.
Who knows?
But it's certainly not a promise, legally or morally.
The Chronicle's final proof is the biggest laugher of all.
. . . and [they] would comply with it fully.
This is what the Chronicle meant by "comply with it fully," presumably, is the same thing it meant when it said the industry "pledg[ed] to honor that provision."
Okay, editorial board: Take a deep breath. Here's what Ms. Ignagni really said:
With respect to the provisions related to coverage for children, we . . . will fully comply with regulations consistent with the principles described in your letter.
What Ms. Ignangi actually said -- as anyone who has ever practiced law, politics, lobbying, or common sense can plainly see -- is that her member companies would obey the law and obey the coming regulations. Nothing more, nothing less.
That's also boilerplate.
She's positioning her trade association and its members as law abiders. They'll obey the laws and regulations because that's what companies do and, frankly, because they have absolutely no alternative.
So.
How did the insurance companies violate the law or the regulations?
Answer: They didn't. It is impossible to violate a regulation that is not yet in effect.
They simply refused to continue selling the kind of policies covered by the new regulations.
That was legal and, from a business perspective, prudent.
Shame on the Houston Chronicle for its blind and persistent refusal to acknowledge the harm their preferred polices have done and will do to the American perople, and for slandering -- as it has done many times before -- an entire industry that simply refuses to go broke and get out of the way of a single-payor system.
Profit over principle? The Chronicle knows naught of profit and less of principle.
* * *
Where did the Chronicle find this letter, this smoking gun? Possibly from -- the irony is delicious -- Talking Points Memo, a hard-left Web site that runs propaganda from the administration and rants by its stable of writers.
Not unlike the Houston Chronicle editorial board, actually.
How far out is TPM?
If it had had its way, John Edwards would be our president.
Go here to see the letter.
* * *
The thing to read is "Kids 0, Insurance 0," a September 25 editorial by the Wall Street Journal. In the new age of Obamacare, "for-profit companies are refusing the sell products that consumers want to buy."
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Sorry this this is so long. I didn't have time to write a short blog.
UPDATE: Go here for a righteous takedown of the editorial by Dr. John W. Diamond, a fellow at the Baker Institute. Great headline: "Incompetence over common sense."
UPDATE: I've also been reminded of a point I should have mentioned in the original post: It takes some chutzpah for a newspaper to base an editorial on Obamacare on alleged promise-breaking by the health insurance industry.
This for legislation promoted by a president who promised that it was not a tax (the administration now describes the penalty for violation of the individual mandate as a tax in court documents), that folks could keep their coverage if they like it (people are already losing coverage, with more horror stories to come), that Obamacare would drive down the cost of insurance (it's going up everywhere, thanks to Obamacare), and that Obamacare would not finance abortions (but if nobody believed the promise when made, can it be broken?).
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