Health Insurers Set To Profiteer Off of Obama-Baucus "Reform"

September 19 (LPAC)—The role of the big health insurance companies—led by UnitedHealth Group—in writing the Obama Administration's so-called health reform legislation, has gotten so blatant that even Business Week is scandalizing the swindle.

In its Aug. 17 issue, under the headline "Why Health Insurers Are Winning," Business Week details how UnitedHealth Group, under former Tony Blair aide Simon Stevens, has captured such leading Democratic lawmakers and influence peddlers as Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), former Senate Majority Leader and top Obama health-care advisor Tom Daschle, Sen. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.), and others. UnitedHealth actually produced the power-point presentation that Warner displayed at a recent town hall meeting, lying to the audience that these were "undisputed, objective facts," not prepared by his own office (he neglected to mention the source of the presentation). They helped him draft legislation, to increase insurance payments to hospice care—as a cost-saving measure.

A Falls Church, Va. consulting firm, cited by many leading Congressional Democrats as a source on actuarial data, the Lewin Group, is wholly owned by UnitedHealth. And Tom Daschle, as EIR has long exposed, has been on the UnitedHealth payroll as a "consultant" for a long time—predating the current battle over so-called health-care "reform."

According to the Business Week account, one of the cornerstones of the health insurance industry strategy is to block any public option, that might reduce the number of people covered through the private, for-profit insurance industry. It was United Healthcare's Simon Stevens who, in effect, delivered the draft legislation to Sen. Conrad, creating an "alternative" private coop system, to an expansion of public coverage. "With less heft than a proposed national plan," Business Week reported, "the state medical cooperatives would pose a far weaker competitive threat to private insurers."

The CEO of UnitedHealth Group, since a management shakeout in Dec. 2006, over stock manipulations, is Stephen Hemsley, who formerly was CFO of the Enron-shipwrecked accounting firm, Arthur Anderson. In August 2007, Hemsley hired a new top K Street lobbyist, Judah C. Sommers, who came to United after serving as chief global lobbyist for Goldman Sachs. Among Sommers' first hires at the new, expanded lobbying unit: Cory Alexander, former chief of staff to current House Majority Leader, Steny Hoyer (D-Md.).