Outrage jolts health insurers

The horrible murder of UnitedHealthcare's CEO in New York City tore the scab off a torrent of public anger against the health insurance industry. Thousands of people across the country took to social media to share stories of critical care denial and massive medical debt.

Western New York's voice in Congress, Republican Rep. Claudia Tenney, wasted no time trying to get ahead of the winds of anger. Trying to present herself as some sort of anti-insurance champion, she declared on social media site X, "Everyone who voted for Obamacare, voted to empower government and to enrich insurance companies while eliminating the doctor-patient relationship."

Tenney and many other politicians in Washington have good reason to fear consumer outrage. They are the health insurance companies' biggest boosters and they have been rewarded well for their loyalty.

According to federal records, Tenney received more than $165,000 from insurance companies in her campaign for reelection this year. That is a fortune to most of us. Among the big contributors was UnitedHealthcare.

Tenney is not the only member of Congress beholden to large medical corporations. Political contributions like these, millions of dollars' worth, are business investments to win loyalty from those with power. Enriching health insurers is not something these members of Congress oppose. It is their mission.

It is telling that Tenney would like her constituents to believe the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) was a gift to insurance companies. The real story is just the opposite. I know this from direct experience.

In the 1990s, I worked as a health care advocate for Consumers Union, the publisher of Consumer Reports magazine. A group of desperate mothers and fathers reached out to me for help. They called themselves Parents of Kids With Cancer. They had joined together for emotional support but soon discovered they were as traumatized by the abuses of their health insurers as they were the illness.

In the most despairing moment of their lives, their health insurers offered up canceled procedures and staggering, unpayable bills.

We put together a broad coalition of groups, from the Diabetes Association to Act UP (the anti-AIDS group), to demand a law prohibiting insurance companies from excluding people with pre-existing conditions and canceling people's policies when they got sick. Health insurers fought us tooth and nail for more than a decade.

Pre-conditions coverage finally won for the entire country in 2010 by its inclusion in the Affordable Care Act. Many thousands of Americans qualified for health insurance, a giant victory for the public demand.

But it was a giant defeat for health insurance corporations, one they would like to reverse. Tenney and many other Republicans in Congress voted once (in 2017) to repeal the protections of the Affordable Care Act and are now committed to doing so again.

This next year is going to be critical for health consumers. Powerful interests, including health insurers, pharmaceutical companies, and others, are joining with congressional Republicans to push a whole package of health care rollbacks.Their agenda is not a secret.

They want to repeal the Affordable Care Act without any plan for a replacement; cut the federal support that helps hold down the cost of insurance premiums for middle-class consumers; stop the federal government from negotiating lower drug prices, and end the caps on how much seniors pay for prescriptions.

They also want to remove important consumer protections against health insurer abuse, in the name of "deregulation."

Americans today still suffer from a health care system designed to profit the corporations that own it, not to help us be healthy at a reasonable cost. Money that should go to health care is sucked away by corporate profits, salaries and bureaucracies.

The last thing Americans need right now is to go backward and let big insurers, pharmaceutical giants and corporate hospitals do whatever they want to us.

American consumers are not stupid. We know from our direct experience what corporate greed in the health care system means when we are sick and need care. We know that big insurers are not writing members of Congress six-figure checks out of kindness.

Politicians can try to spin consumer-first health care, but their voting records and campaign contributions speak for themselves.

Jim Shultz is a resident of Lockport, New York, founder/executive director of the Democracy Center, and an occasional CNHI columnist. Reach him at: [email protected].