Besides executive compensation as the most obvious whipping boy, and a generic expenses inquiry that would include lobbying and all; this on the second page seemed more on point to show how some hosing is going on which would be less likely if a public option existed free of such blight.
Waxman and Stupak also sought documents relating to premiums paid by policy holders, claims payments, sales expenses, administrative expenses and profits, broken down by categories such as employer-provided coverage; individual coverage, Medicare and Medicaid.
The requests were issued at a time when Obama's health care proposal is under intense attack from Republicans and other critics, including the health insurance industry. Much of the opposition focuses on proposals for the government to sell insurance in competition with private carriers.
Obama and other supporters of a so-called government option argue it would help control costs and keep insurance companies honest by forcing them to grapple with competition.
[italics added]
Over compensation and non-service related expenditures [lobbying plus] that would be absent in the competing public option would lead the exploitative things to be curbed in the private sector to stay competitive with an honest [i.e., public] shop.
The quoteed info, once attained, would disclose exploitative things going on under the status quo.
Bravo.
Waxman and Stupak are following the money, while Baucus and Grassley and Ross and all are saying "Show me the money."
Who wears the white hat, who wears the villain's black hat, when the numbers are out will be less conjectural. Hence, more interesting than speculation and reports such as that in Business Week, where the cancer in Minnetonka appears to rest its hopes on saying, "Trust me," and a dog-and-pony show-and-tell trailer.
....................
The story grew legs. WaPo reports, here. Here, for a pdf posted online by WaPo of the letter sent to the cancer in Minnetonka [the request goes back to 2003, and that overlaps the Lois Quam tenure, so local interests attach since all politics are local]. This Google. Photo of trailer, BW; photo of Stupak and Waxman, WaPo._________UPDATE__________
I am troubled by things such as this WaPo report excerpt, from the insurance industry, after it has engaged in a round of hooliganism and incitement at town meetings, conduct of the coarsest kind, replete with disinformation and all:
Robert Zirkelbach, a spokesman for America's Health Insurance Plans, said the industry viewed the Waxman-Stupak letters as a "politically driven" distraction from more important issues.
"This is a fishing expedition," Zirkelbach said. "There has been an effort in recent weeks to shift the debate to focus on the health insurance industry rather than solutions on health care."
The suggestion is you can fix a problem, without consensus, with one side having orchestrated acrimony, without knowing what the underlying facts of the problem really are.
That's Mad Hatter Tea Party more than taxpayer tea party.
If "the health insurance industry" is independent of "solutions on health care" I at present, with the information requested to yet be supplied and made public, cannot see how that could be.
Clearly such quick-shot artistry as the Zirkelbach quote is fine for billing out time to the insurers, but after the circus, supply the facts.
Without knowing what exactly a problem is, it is difficult ti fix it unless there's an absence of debate and full consensus - at least majority consensus making extended honest fact-finding unneeded. But such consensus is so far lacking.
If health insurance companies are NOT a part of the problem, then that means they can go away while the problem is being fixed. If they are ae efficient, defect-free, and not at all at fault as they purport to be, they can quit wasting money on lobbying. Let market dynamics prevail.
Existing efficient trouble-free private insurance would mean that if a public option were enacted, it should not bother them at all.
They would continue to offer greater efficiency and lower cost than the pubic option (of which they are universally dismissive), and the invisible hand of the market will act so that the public option will fade into disuse and obscurity; much as private turnpikes have yielded to public highways and unemployment insurance and workman's comp has been abandoned by the private sector, to be something handled entirely through state adjudication and case-by-case review within each state's bureaus. And there appear to be areas of cooperation part public, part private, the air travel industry being the primary example - government runs facilities, private firms own, maintain, and market the aircraft seats and negotiate destination and gate rights, and ticket prices.
Health care is open to exactly such an arrangement. Medicare for all, with extended coverage open to however the private sector chooses to handle it; that's one option.
Another option is to have parallel systems, where a public plan and private plans compete on a level playing field, with the membership and service rules the same for each. That is the most American way of doing things; both enter the market, the inefficient perish, the efficient survive.
It is how capitalism, in all the lore, is said to operate.
I do not understand what any efficient private sector insurance providers would have to fear from level playing field competition, with universal coverage.
I suppose they want a situation like parcel delivery; UPS and Fed Ex cherry pick the profitable trade, leaving junk mail delivery to the post office since it's a cash sink that would fail on its own without subsidy.
But cherry picking, really is un-American. It is a disgrace to the flag. All that. Leaving only the old and badly sick for the public sector, and cherry-picking young healthy folks for UnitedHealth, and allowing them trick ways to weasel out of coverage when the rubber meets the road - that's morally indecent as well as un-American.
Moral decency is part of things. The most critical part. Moral indecency is, to use the term again, un-American. We allegedly are a morally decent nation.
The debate is not only about money.
Government must protect the poor from the rich and the rich from each other.
Unemployment insurance and allowing unions is an example of meeting the former duty, Bernie Madoff is an example of a failure of the latter.
Madoff happened because regulation failed to stop Madoff, and that was because regulation that existed had been dismantled - because Clinton and his Goldman Sachs treasury secretary, Bush and his, and Gramm and others in the legislature all failed to do their jobs. Their real jobs. They served the interests that served them, but that's not doing the real job.