HMO's Spent $227 Million in Support of SCHIP

From the examiner.com article of Oct 5, 2007: "Timothy P. Carney: Does SCHIP insure kids or subsidize savvy HMOs?"

Supporters reject the argument that SCHIP is a Trojan horse for socialized medicine, pointing out that the program is usually administered by private insurers. In short, states put “poor” children on private HMOs and let the taxpayers pick up the tab.

For the HMOs, what could be better than a customer who is spending someone else’s money? If Congress spends more money on SCHIP and states are scrambling to enroll more families, then HMOs get even more of these customers.

And so while Democrats are dragging children to the White House for photo ops, as if the children are the primary constituency of this bill, federal lobbying records tell a different tale.

Lobbying records from the first half of 2007 show that the health care industry spent more than $227 million lobbying Washington. Congressional Quarterly Healthbeat News reported last month: “What’s behind health care lobbyists’ spending frenzy? Most signs point to ... SCHIP.”

Sure enough, the biggest lobbyists in the industry all support the Democratic bill. America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), the trade association for HMOs, supports the bill, as do its biggest members, such as Blue Cross Blue Shield.

The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturing Association (PhRMA), one of Washington’s most powerful lobbyists, is also behind the bill. So is the American Medical Association.

So, here's one point that needs going back over:Supporters reject the argument that SCHIP is a Trojan horse for socialized medicine, pointing out that the program is usually administered by private insurers.

Technically this is true. Private companies being paid by the government is, in fact, a characteristic of Corporatism -- a term which is synonymous with "Fascism". Either way, however, the end result is the furthered corrosion of the purchaser/consumer bond -- already painfully tenuous in this nation -- between the person who buys the healthcare and the person who benefits from it.

It is almost tautological: when you separate the consumption from the cost, the cost skyrockets.