One more key step in hcr just successed in the House. From the Speaker's blog.
By a vote of 406-19, the House passed the Health Insurance Industry Fair Competition Act (HR 4626), introduced by Reps. Tom Perriello (D-VA) and Betsy Markey (D-CO). This bill is designed to restore competition and transparency to the health insurance market – by repealing the blanket antitrust exemption afforded to health insurance companies by the McCarran-Ferguson Act of 1945. Under this legislation, health insurers will no longer be shielded from legal accountability for price fixing, dividing up territories among themselves, sabotaging their competitors in order to gain monopoly power, and other such anti-competitive practices....
This bill is also necessary because, over the years, health insurers have been able to use this antitrust exemption to block court actions regarding anti-competitive behavior. In Ocean State Physicians Health Plan, Inc. v Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Rhode Island, the First Circuit Court – citing the McCarran-Ferguson antitrust exemption – overturned a jury verdict against the dominant health insurer for using its monopoly power to put financial pressure on area employers to refuse to do business with a competing HMO.
There is also evidence that removing this antitrust exemption will result in lower prices and other benefits for consumers. Time and time again, increased competition results in lower prices, increased choice, and greater innovation. A healthy and competitive health insurance market will drive prices down in the health insurance industry, just as we have seen it do in so many other industries where competition is allowed to take hold. Since California passed a law in 1988 that eliminated the state antitrust exemption for the auto insurance industry, for instance, auto premiums for consumers in California have risen by 9.8% while the rest of the country has seen auto premiums rise by over 48%.
Five Democrats voted with Republicans on the motion to recommit the bill prior to passage. Apparently, John Adler (NJ-03), Bobby Bright (AL-02), Jim Marshall (GA-08), Harry Teague (NM-02), and Mary Jo Kilroy (OH-15), preferred the watered down Republican approach. Nonetheless, every Democrat present and 153 of the Republicans voted for final passage.
It's smart strategy on Pelosi's part--take a very popular part of the reform package and force a vote on it, make members vote on whether they respresent the people who voted them into office or the corporations. It might actually be instructive for Harry Reid.
The bill now goes to the Senate, where it can be bill 291 that the House is passed and the Senate sits on.
See calchala's diary for ongoing discussion.