Up until now, the insurance industry did a pretty good job of at least pretending in public that they were helping out on healthcare reform. That public face, of course, hid all of the things they were doing behind the scenes, detailed very well in this report from Think Progress.
Now that the reform effort has not collapsed under either its own weight, or the dirty campaign that AHIP has been waging against it, the mask is off, and they are making no attempt at all to pretend otherwise. First we had the deceptive report they released attacking both the Baucus bill and other components of reform, like the public option, Karen Ignagni's doubling down on that thoroughly debunked report on the op-ed pages of WaPo, and the ad campaign to scare seniors. Just for starters.
Now, Sam Stein is reporting that AHIP lobbyists are going for the jugular, trying to whip up Republicans against the "enemy" to kill reform at AHIP's annual State Issues Conference.
Steve Champlin, a lobbyist for the Duberstein Group who represents AHIP, declared that the road to a bipartisan health care reform bill was, essentially, dead. And he urged GOP members to keep it that way.
"There is absolutely no interest, no reason Republicans should ever vote for this thing. They have gone from a party that got killed 11 months ago to a party that is rising today. And they are rising up on the turmoil of health care," said Champlin. "So when they vote for a health care reform bill, whatever it is, they are giving comfort to the enemy who is down."
"Long before the Republicans discovered that the House bill was a strategy to kill seniors and all that kind of stuff the plan was already unpopular," he added, underscoring why Republicans shouldn't attach themselves to the legislation.
Republicans must love hearing from someone that they're on the rise. Leave it to an AHIP lobbyist to deliver that message.
This part is special, too:
Since the event was a conference for the private insurance industry, much of the panel's time was spent lamenting the vilification of private insurers. Champlin, in particular, was caustic in discussing how the Obama administration and Democrats in Congress had framed the debate. They are, he said trying to "motivate change through creating an enemy. And the enemy is the insurance company."
Because denying coverage to four-month old babies because they're "too fat," denying coverage to women who've been raped, who've had c-sections (telling them to get sterilized if they want coverage), calling disabled customers "dogs" and "trainwrecks," doesn't make health insurers the enemy. That's just good business practice. Nothing that should make them vilified.
But the larger question is, now that AHIP has thrown themselves entirely into the Republican obstruction effort, what Democrats are going to step up and join them?
