Obama refuses to adopt health cost containment policies but attacks insurers for raising premiums

From The Daily Beast:

Following a meeting Friday with the chief executives of the country's four largest health-insurance companies, President Obama took to the airwaves Saturday morning to attack the group's latest rate hikes. "They couldn't give me a straight answer as to why they keep arbitrarily and massively raising premiums—by as much as 60 percent in states like Illinois," Obama said in his weekly radio address. "If we do not act, they will continue to do this." The president repeated his call to Congress to finish health-care legislation, which the House and Senate are working to pass within weeks. "I know it has been a long and hard road to this point," Obama said. "And we are not finished with our journey just yet. But we are close. We are very close. And so I ask Congress to finish its work."

My take:

Is Obama this ignorant about markets? Or is he pretending to be this ignorant?

We know there are at least two facets of the current system that are driving up insurance premiums.

One is trial lawyers - co-owners, with George Soros, of the Democrat Party - who play jackpot justice with physicians and hospitals. They sue, on almost any pretext, on behalf of plaintiffs who may, or may not, have been injured in the course of medical treatment. Often, they use the discovery process to identify any shortcomings in treatment that they can add to their case.

In response, physicians and hospitals protect themselves by ordering treatment that may not be medically necessary to protect themsleves from the legal process.

That drives up medical costs, as well as insurance premiums.

Second, the current system does not allow insurers to sell insurance across state lines. This defeats price competition and drives up premiums.

Conservatives have tried to deal with both of these shortcomings through tort reform and by allowing insurers to sell policies across state lines, but have been thwarted by Obama and congressional Democrats.

Obama's lack of interest is understandable. He has spent much of his life among Marxists, who have no interest in improving a system that they are bent on subverting, or overthrowing.

Obama hints he'd accept tort reform, angering Dem trial lawyers, to get Obamacare anacted

Trial lawyers defeated President George W. Bush’s push for medical liability reform and successfully lobbied to water down tort reform provisions in healthcare reform bills this Congress. But the battle is far from over.

And in an odd twist, a longtime ally of the trial lawyers could be the one to resurrect the idea -- President Barack Obama.

“I would hope this would be an area we just don’t go,” said Linda Lipsen, vice president for public affairs at the American Association for Justice, the trade group for trial attorneys.

Lipsen said. “The last thing Congress should be doing is eliminating people’s rights when the real issue is safety in hospitals.”

Obama’s hints that he is willing to make a deal with Republicans on medical malpractice reform has got physicians and trial lawyers scratching their heads.

As recently as Tuesday, Obama floated the possibility of offering an olive branch to Republicans on malpractice reform as a gesture of bipartisanship. “I've said from the beginning of this debate I'd be willing to work on that,” Obama remarked during a press briefing.

Why tort reform is not on the health care table

From San Francisco Examiner

"...trial lawyers have effectively bought themselves veto power.

In the ranking by OpenSecrets.org of campaign contributions by the top 100 special interests during the past 20 years, the American Association for Justice — formerly the Association of Trial Lawyers of America — ranks sixth. The AAJ is trial lawyers’ Washington lobbying group, and 90 percent of its $30.7 million in contributions since 1989 went to Democrats. At the other end of this pay-to-play process in the Capitol, AAJ has spent nearly $14 million lobbying Congress just since Democrats won control of both chambers, including $2.3 million so far this year.

The Democratic focus of the plaintiffs’ bar is even more obvious from campaign contributions of National Journal’s top 15 class-action trial attorney firms.

As the Examiner’s David Freddoso and Kevin Mooney reported last week, those firms have in 2009 contributed more than $636,000, 99 percent of which went to Democrats. And employees of those firms have given more than $236,000 to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee this year. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid faces an uphill re-election battle, but the top trial lawyers’ firms are right there for him, with contributions totaling some $54,000 to date."

Dems could bend health care cost curve down by infuriating trial lawyers who fund their campaigns

"The second component, which can explain the difference in baseline healthcare costs for the United States compared to other developed countries, is the medical-legal environment that healthcare is practiced in. The United States has the least tort-adverse healthcare system in the world. Studies estimate that $200 - $500 billion of the annual US health care budget is attributable to defensive medicine.

So the question is, can we cut costs and expand access to care for more Americans while maintaining what is good about our current healthcare market and respecting the values of individual liberty, freedom, and personal responsibility that this country was founded upon? The answer is yes but we have to decrease government imposed restrictions on consumer choice in the healthcare market and enact nationwide tort reform."