Word: ignagni
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...insurance under the law President Obama signed Tuesday. "We are literally going to try to raise tens of millions of dollars per year for the next several years, beyond 2014 when most of these things get implemented," says Pollack. He says he plans to meet Wednesday with Karen Ignagni, the head of AHIP, to discuss the involvement of insurance companies...
...surface, there was nothing unusual about the Oct. 6 telephone call between White House health-care boss Nancy-Ann DeParle and Karen Ignagni, the leading medical-insurance lobbyist in Washington. The two women have known each other for years and often speak several times a week. Though Ignagni's group, America's Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), has long been leery of - and at other times downright hostile to - the health-care bills moving through Congress, an uneasy truce was holding between the insurers and a White House bent on reform. But just barely: when DeParle and a Senate aide asked...
Five days later, Ignagni released an analysis by PricewaterhouseCoopers that claimed, on the basis of a misleading reading of the bill, that reform could lead to a painful spike in insurance premiums for ordinary Americans. The episode shattered the thin trust between the Administration and the insurance lobby and set the stage for an ugly and very public war over the shape of the final measure. "I feel completely misled," said the Senate aide who was on the call. "There are a couple of things you have to have in this town, and your good name is one of them...
...AHIP report was the kind of one-sided study that lobbyists sometimes commission to create scary sound bites. It worked. The report analyzed the impact of four narrow features of the Senate Finance bill using a worst-case-scenario model; it concluded, as Ignagni says, that "health care costs [would] increase far faster and higher than they would under the current system." A fairer reading of the bill, which cleared the Finance Committee on Oct. 13 with a 14-9 vote, with one Republican supporter, suggests these projected costs are wildly exaggerated. Other provisions of the bill are aimed...
Though the industry's alarmism failed to derail the Baucus bill, the struggle over health-care reform is far from over. The conversations between DeParle and Ignagni laid bare what is really at stake for the insurers as health-care reform has gained momentum. For example, both DeParle and the Senate aide claim Ignagni voiced serious concerns during the Oct. 6 call over a provision in the Senate Finance bill that would raise $600 million in new taxes on the salaries of high-paid insurance executives. DeParle also said that in a White House meeting the next day, Ignagni repeatedly...