I am writing today to announce the closure of the New Mexico Independent. After three and a half years of operation in New Mexico, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news…
While environmental activists played their part yesterday during demonstrations at the capitol building, going so far as to dress up as solar panels and to sing the tune of “You Are My Sunshine,” their counterparts, the anti-cap-and-trade contingency who has…
Roughly one quarter of University of New Mexico students are unimpressed with the state’s flagship public school, according to a survey that questioned college students about their higher education experiences.
A health insurance industry-funded study of the Senate Finance Committee version of the health insurance bill, showing that health care costs would increase, is drawing fierce criticism from Democrats in the Senate Finance Committee as well as from the Obama administration.
The report was conducted by by PriceWaterHouseCoopers(PWHC) for the Association of Health Insurance Providers (AHIP), but critics of the study show it omits some key information.
A spokesman for the Democrats on the Senate Finance Committee, Scott Mulhauser, called the report “untrue, disingenuous and bought and paid for by the same health insurance companies that have been gouging too many consumers for too long as they stand in the way of reform yet again.”
More from Mulhauser:
This report is pitching some seriously flawed analysis that nobody’s buying as it excludes all the provisions that will actually lower the cost of coverage – tax credits, grandfathering for existing policies, increased enrollment in private coverage and administrative savings from a more efficient mechanism for purchasing coverage. It’s a health insurance company hatchet job, plain and simple.”
Meanwhile, the White House spokeswoman Linda Douglas told Talking Points Memo that the report is “self-serving” and “comes on the eve of a vote that will reduce the industry’s profits.”
Robert Zirclebach, a spokesman for AHIP, said on Fox News this morning that “several of the provisions that are currently being considered are going to have the unintended consequence of causing health care costs to increase.”
Jonathon Cohn looked at the points that the PWHC study missed, and admitted to doing so, in coming up with conclusions that health care rates will rise with the Senate Finance Committee bill.
Washington Post blogger Ezra Klein calls the study “deceptive” and says it follows “[i]n the hallowed tradition of the tobacco and energy industries.”
Klein says the study is not sound policy analysis, but does show that “the insurance industry is getting scared.”
