insurance industry

Last Thursday, nine protesters were arrested for refusing to leave the office of Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.). Today, six more were hauled away, Roll Call reports.
CodePink** helped organize both sit-ins, protesting Lieberman’s threat to filibuster the health care reform bill. Joan Stallard, a CodePink member who watched Tuesday as police carted off her colleagues, accused [...]

Reid called the insurers’ anti-trust exemption “anticompetitive and damaging to the American economy.”

The American Association for Justice — the trial lawyers’ lobby group — has just released an astounding statistic:  medical malpractice insurance companies’ average profits are higher than those of 99 percent of Fortune 500 companies.
As the nation remains mired in a debate over health care reform and how to keep down the costs of expanding [...]

Earlier today, we previewed an effort by Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) to require insurance companies to dedicate a minimum share of premium revenues to health care delivery, as opposed to administrative costs, profits and executive pay. Moments ago, the West Virginia Democrat made his case for the amendment, then withdrew it. The Congressional Budget Office, [...]

Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.), chairman of the Senate Finance Committee’s health subpanel, is no fan of the insurance industry, as was made perfectly clear during Tuesday’s debate on his failed amendment to create a public plan.
Along those lines, the West Virginia Democrat plans today to propose legislation requiring insurance companies to dedicate a minimum percentage [...]

Congressional Republicans have, for months, insisted that they’re interested in a bipartisan compromise on health reform this year. It’s the Democrats, they claim, who are ignoring the GOP’s wonderful ideas in efforts to ram through something like socialized medicine — a bill that conservatives say the Democrats haven’t even read.
Yet, if today’s exchange between [...]

With the health reform debate in recent weeks focused largely on GOP opposition to a government-sponsored insurance plan, the implication has been that eliminating the public option would attract Republicans to the proposal.
Hardly.
Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) told reporters today that Republicans also won’t support the Democrats’ proposal because (1) the costs are too high, [...]

The New York Times today does a nice job pointing out some of the limitations of the co-op coverage model being pushed by “Gang of Six” member Sen. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) as an alternative to the government-backed option preferred by the White House and Democratic leaders. Conrad says the public plan proposal simply doesn’t have [...]

Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.), a longtime supporter of a single-payer health care system, has been doing much of the liberal grumbling today in the face of headlines indicating that the Obama administration would accept a health reform strategy absent a government-backed insurance option.
Weiner went on CNN this afternoon to warn whoever’s listening that “walking away [...]

A statement this afternoon from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi leaves no mystery as to where the California Democrat stands on the public insurance option that’s been so contentious as the year’s health reform debate swirls on.
“A public option,” she says, “is the best option to lower costs, improve the quality of health care, ensure choice [...]