FACT CHECK: Health Insurers' Big $ Profits & Fat Bonuses

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FACT CHECK: Health Insurers' Profits Not So Fat
- AssociatedPress 10/25/09

(revised headline)
FACT CHECK: Health insurers' profits 35th of 53
- Associated Press 10/26/09

But who is the Associated Press Associated with?
(when a misleading article gets top billing at a key moment, something stinks in the press room)

With the Senate's version of the health care reform due this week and the public option depending on one or two votes, I just rolled my eyes when I saw a "top" AP headline that read "FACT CHECK: Health Insurers' Profits Not So Fat". But when the article appeared in my top 5 headlines the next very next day under the headline, "FACT CHECK: Health insurers' profits 35th of 53", I decided to take a few minutes to debug the deception. The content included:

"In the health care debate, Democrats and their allies have gone after insurance companies as rapacious profiteers making "immoral" and "obscene" returns while "the bodies pile up." But in pillorying insurers over profits, the critics are on shaky ground. Ledgers tell a different reality."

What they want you to know, is that the average health insurance provider only made a 6% profit last year, which is apparently true. What they want you to think is, "gee, those poor health insurance guys just eek out a living like the rest of us!" -- which is false, and is clearly intended as a smokescreen to hinder health care industry reform.

Here's the slimy truth!

Any accountant or good investor will tell you it is not how much profit percentage they report, the question is, "How much money did the health insurance industry make?" They can make themselves millionaires without making one dime in profits.

The health insurance industry pays itself millions of dollars in individual salaries, bonus' and rewards for successfully dropping sick policyholders, and is spending $1.4 million a day lobbying against healthcare reform. It's all deducted from profits!

And on top of that, they made BILLIONS in profits last year
-- high DOLLAR, low PERCENTAGE, profits!

The AP articles point out that: "The railroads brought in a 12.6 percent profit margin" which is twice as much as the health insurance industry. The irony, however, is that most Americans NEVER SPEND ONE PENNY riding a railroad, but SPEND HUNDREDS OF DOLLARS EVERY MONTH being railroaded by health insurance companies!

To illustrate:
Company A profits 12% on widget sales of $100 for a profit of 12 dollars.
Company B profits 6% on widget sales of $100 billion for a profit of 6 BILLION dollars

Now, here's a real example:
UnitedHealth Group, made $2.97 billion last year,
acting as the middle man between you and your doctor,
making money making decisions about money!

Is that "shaky ground" for "pillorying insurers over profits?"
Does the "ledger tell a different reality?"

The reality is that our "news" is poisoned by politics disquised as journalism
and it is democracy that is on shaky ground.

The healthcare industry is pulling out all stops because a real non-profit "public option" would introduce good, old fashioned competition to the health care equation. But we can't even get that much as long as the health care industry is also acting as the middle man between us and "real news" and is influencing congress with our blood money. And we will continue to break records for people dying due to lack of health insurance and for people going bankrupt because they can't afford to pay 6% to profiteers working against their best interest.

As to the question "Who the Associated Press is Associated with?", the answer is hundreds of news bureaus, thousands of employees, and over a billion readers, listeners, and viewers every day. The writers can be biased, influenced, and/or have an agenda. The power and the problem lies in who feeds you the news and who prioritizes what you are exposed to? Don't rely on one source and read between the lines. If it's an alleged "Fact Check", read between the facts too!

The real AP Headline should read:
FACT CHECK: Health Insurers' Big $ Profits & Fat Bonuses
could be Hazardous to your Health!

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You don't have to wonder why the polls don't reflect a majority of support for the healthcare reform bill.

Here's the latest "fact check" headline on my Yahoo News page. The only headline starting in caps and including a photo (below).

FACT CHECK: Premiums would rise under Obama plan

But when you read the article, you find out that it basically confirms that premiums would either go down for people or, at a minimum, not go up as fast as they would without it. But that doesn't matter. It's all about the headline. Probably 98 out of 100 people just see the headline, instead of read the article.

as a bonus, if you did pull up that whole article, you would have seen a link (below) to a video entitled "President's Cousin Condemns Obamacare". Obama's cousin!

This is being passed off as mainstream news.

FACT CHECK: Premiums would rise under Obama plan
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100317/...aul_fact_check

By RICARDO ALONSO-ZALDIVAR, Associated Press Writer Ricardo Alonso-zaldivar
...
"There's no question premiums are still going to keep going up," said Larry Levitt of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a research clearinghouse on the health care system. "There are pieces of reform that will hopefully keep them from going up as fast. But it would be miraculous if premiums actually went down relative to where they are today."

The statistics Obama based his claims on come from two sources. In both cases, the caveats got left out.

A report for the Business Roundtable, an association of big company CEOs, was the source for the claim that employers could save $3,000 per worker on health care costs, the White House said.

Issued in November, the report looked generally at proposals that Democrats were considering to curb health care costs, concluding they had the potential to significantly reduce future increases.
...
An analysis by the Congressional Budget Office of earlier Senate legislation suggested savings could be fairly modest.

It found that large employers would see premium savings of at most 3 percent compared with what their costs would have been without the legislation. That would be more like a few hundred dollars instead of several thousand.

The claim that people buying coverage individually would save 14 percent to 20 percent comes from the same budget office report, prepared in November for Sen. Evan Bayh, D-Ind. But the presidential sound bite fails to convey the full picture.

The budget office concluded that premiums for people buying their own coverage would go up by an average of 10 percent to 13 percent, compared with the levels they'd reach without the legislation. That's mainly because policies in the individual insurance market would provide more comprehensive benefits than they do today.

For most households, those added costs would be more than offset by the tax credits provided under the bill, and they would pay significantly less than they have to now.

The premium reduction of 14 percent to 20 percent that Obama cites would apply only to a portion of the people buying coverage on their own — those who decide they want to keep the skimpier kinds of policies available today.

Their costs would go down because more young people would be joining the risk pool and because insurance company overhead costs would be lower in the more efficient system Obama wants to create.
...
"People are likely to not buy the same low-value policies they are buying now," said health economist Len Nichols of George Mason University. "If they did buy the same value plans ... the premium would be lower than it is now. This makes the White House statement true. But is it possibly misleading for some people? Sure."