AHIP's new report - which alleges the Baucus health reform bill will raise premiums substantially - has come under proper scorn for its shabbiness and questionable timing. Questionable from a strategic standpoint as well, since it sets up the private insurance industry (everyone's favorite), as the perfect foil for this legislation. And in case you were wondering how the White House would react, you don't have to wait too long:
"This is a self-serving analysis from the insurance industry, one of the major opponents of health insurance reform," White House spokesman Reid Cherlin said.
Now, can we please put to rest the childish and petulant notion that mcjoan loves to propogate that the White House is "naive" or didn't see this coming?
"It comes on the eve of a vote that will reduce the industry's profits. It is hard to take it seriously," [Cherlin] said.
So the White House realizes the bill will reduce the industry's profits - and has been using them as a foil for months - and yet the narrative persists on this site and amongst front-pagers that the WH was naive and just thought everyone would get along until the end? C'mon.
In fact, keeping the "enemies close" paid off in the sense that the insurance industry waited until now to produce this crap, and all this time hasn't run anti-reform ads. Now it's likely too late.
More from the White House:
He said the analysis "completely ignores critical policies will lower costs for those that have insurance, expand coverage and provide affordable health insurance options to millions of Americans who are priced out of today's health insurance market or are locked out by unfair insurance company practices."
Hard to take seriously indeed. Amongst others, Jonathan Cohn excoriates the analysis as a complete farce. Take, for example, this section:
As you may recall, the idea of the excise tax is to end the tax subsidy for more expensive plans. The hope is that, once this subsidy is gone, employers and their employees will react by shopping around for cheaper plans--and that the resulting cost pressure will reduce health care spending overall, leading to lower prices down the line. Most economists seem to think this will be the case. So does the Congressional Budget Office, as best as I can tell. (They don't make pronouncements on how reform will affect private premiums, but they do believe it will lower health care spending overall.)
PriceWaterhouseCoopers acknowledges all of this. But they decide that, for the sake of illustration, they're going to pretend that the tax will have no effect except to raise prices. Once again, you don't have to take my word for it. The report says this explicitly, on page 6:
We have estimated the potential impact of the tax on premiums. Although we expect employers to respond to the tax by restructuring their benefits to avoid it, we demonstrate the impact assuming it is applied.
So the report's a joke, it comes late, and is going to be a perfect foil for the efforts to push reform across the finish line.
Take a step back and look at the overall arc of how this has gone. I realize how invested many around here are in the narrative of "naive White House," but there just isn't any evidence to back this up. This process has been flawed and the Obama White House has made plenty of mistakes. But "naivety" just isn't one of them. Sure there's been lip-service to bi-partisanship and agreement, but that's a PR move, not meant to be taken on face value.
Those who continue to imagine anything else are the naive ones and look increasingly silly.