Insurers open conference amid hostile atmosphere

Mar 9, 2010 — The Hill

Jeffrey Young

Health insurance executives convene in Washington this week for a two-day conference as the Obama administration increases pressure on the industry in a final push for healthcare reform.

America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), the main trade group for the sector, is holding its meeting at the Ritz-Carlton amid a level of hostility for its members that is intense even in the context of the bitter yearlong fight over healthcare reform.

The conference itself has become one battleground in the war. The labor-backed liberal activism group Healthcare for America Now, the AFL-CIO and the Service Employees International Union staged a protest on Tuesday outside the AHIP meeting.

Carrying signs demanding healthcare reform, including “Wanted” posters featuring insurance company executives such as Wellpoint President and CEO Angela Braley and Aetna Chairman and CEO Ron Williams, the mass of protesters marched a few blocks from Washington’s Dupont Circle to the AHIP conference, where they were met by mounted police and other security personnel.

President Barack Obama’s administration has been ratcheting up its rhetoric against health insurance companies in recent days as it tries to rally support for healthcare reform legislation.

“The insurance companies continue to ration healthcare based on who’s sick and who’s healthy, on who can pay and who can’t pay,” Obama said during an event in suburban Philadelphia Monday. “We can’t have a system that works better for the insurance companies than it does for the American people.”

The prospects for final passage of healthcare reform are highly uncertain, however. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has struggled to assemble a winning coalition, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) faces a daunting challenge on pushing reform through what could prove to be a messy budget reconciliation process on the floor.

But the powerful health insurance industry is not taking the threat lightly. In addition to mobilizing its members during the conference this week — on top of insurers’ army of lobbyists — AHIP rolled out a television advertising campaign defending itself against attacks that the industry is merely stonewalling reform.

“Our industry strongly supports healthcare reform because we recognize that the current system is unsustainable,” AHIP President and CEO Karen Ignagni said Tuesday. “The current debate about rising premiums has demonstrated that, in fact, we have a healthcare cost crisis in this country. Unfortunately, the path that has been followed is one of vilification rather than problem solving.”

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has publicly taken insurers to task over proposed premium increases, most notably a since-postponed hike of up to 39 percent by Wellpoint subsidiary Anthem Blue Cross of California.

The administration has fired off sharply worded letters to insurance companies, the latest of which went out Monday, and pulled their executives into the White House for meetings. In a letter to Ignagni on Tuesday, Sebelius asked to speak at the AHIP conference Wednesday morning.

Obama himself dropped by a sit-down between Sebelius and insurance representatives last week to read aloud from a letter written by a cancer survivor facing a 40 percent premium increase.

The Obama administration has been going hard at the insurance industry for months, dating roughly to the aftermath of a tumultuous August congressional recess that put Democrats on their heels.

The all-out war between Democrats and health insurance companies did not always seem inevitable, however.

In the early months of the healthcare reform push, healthcare industry groups, including AHIP, sounded positive notes.