Daily Beast: Tom Daschle: health care's secret powerbroker

Rightardia comment: Health care co-ops are small potatoes in the health care industry. Almost all of them are small businesses that offer limited health care services.


Although Blue Cross started out as a coop, it morphed into a commercial health care company in many states. In addition, many non-profits and not-for-profits can hide profitability by giving executives and management lavish salaries, bonuses and perks. A good example of this is the former United Way CEO, William Arimony.


William Aramony was CEO of United Way of America for more than twenty years and helped build the organisation into one of the top four non-profits in the United States. He resigned in 1992 amid allegations of financial mismanagement and criminal activity, for which he was convicted and sentenced to prison.


The government can create super-coops that can operate across state lines. These super-coops would have to be heavily regulated to keep overhead low particularity in the executive offices.


Health care is fundamentally a monopoly enterprise that needs to be regulated. The average health care worker would come out ahead by working for the government rather than private enterprise. Collective bargianing should be built into super-coops as well as a counterforce to corporate greed.   

Although Tom Daschle withdrew his nomination as health secretary months ago, the former senator is exercising tremendous influence on the shaping of the health-care bill from behind the scenes, the New York Times reports.
Daschle began promoting the non-profit insurance cooperative plan two months ago as a politically feasible way to pass reforms. Now, Senate leaders and President Obama are moving towards that plan and away from the public option, to the dismay of the left.

Daschle is a highly paid adviser to health care industry clients of a law and lobbying firm, though he is not a registered lobbyist himself. Critics say his advisory role to the White House is inappropriate, due to his lobbying ties.

But Obama and Daschle met as recently as Friday, and
Daschle was introduced at one event as "the architect of President
Obama's health care plan."

Daschle says he favors a government-run insurance plan, but doesn't think it could pass, and that his suppor  for a non-profit cooperative model has nothing to do with the interests of his industry clients.

Read it at The New York Times:
http://e.thedailybeast.com/a/tBKkTxqB7SwhTB7uuXD-chc-qCb/dail1

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Compromise Co-Op Proposal Won't Lower Costs, Government Study Showed

Rightardia comments: We wrote two articles on co-ops and pointed out hat co-ops are small potatoes in the health insurance industry. Without a law change that creates super-co-ops that can operate across state lines and are regulated by the government, the health care giants will buy the co-ops out like they did to the non-profit, Blue Cross.

Rightardia is not against co-ops, but a public health option is also needed like the the rest of the industrial world uses.

The health care reform compromise that centrist Democrats and several Republicans have indicated they'd support has shown an inability to effectively lower premiums for consumers, a newly resurfaced government study shows.

In recent days, a slew of lawmakers, notably Sens. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) and Richard Shelby (R-Ala.), have begun a renewed push to establish health care insurance cooperatives as an alternative to a publicly run insurance plan.

But there's a study at hand that undercuts the argument that co-ops would drastically alter the health insurance market.

The U.S. General Accounting Office produced a report on cooperatives in March 2000 that was mostly sour on the idea. Using five different co-ops as examples, the study concluded that on the key function -- lowering the cost of insurance -- these non-profit insurance pools came up well short.

"The cooperatives' potential to reduce overall premiums is limited because

1. They lack sufficient leverage as a result of their limited market share

2. The cooperatives have not been able to produce administrative cost savings for insurers;

3. Their state laws and regulations already restrict to differing degrees the amount insurers can vary the premiums charged different groups purchasing the same health plan."

See the complete Sam Stein article at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/08/17/compromise-co-op-proposal_n_261044.html

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