More Phony-Baloney

This morning the Washington Post reported that the Chamber of Commerce is proposing to spend $50,000 to hire a “respected economist” to write a report that would back-up the thoroughly debunked insurance industry claim that health reform is harmful to the economy.

According to the Washington Post:

Step two, according to the e-mail, appears to assume the outcome of the economic review: "The economist will then circulate a sign-on letter to hundreds of other economists saying that the bill will kill jobs and hurt the economy. We will then be able to use this open letter to produce advertisements, and as a powerful lobbying and grass-roots document."

If this storyline sounds eerily familiar, that’s because it is. We’ve seen these so-called “economic studies” - with predetermined outcomes - appear at critical times in the health reform debate before.

On the eve of vote on reform legislation in the Senate Finance Committee in mid-October, Blue Cross Blue Shield and America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP) released similarly bogus and self-serving reports in a last-ditch attempt to kill reform before it passed out of committee. PricewaterhouseCoopers, the firm retained by AHIP to write the report, erased any grain of AHIP’s credibility when it issued a public statement admitting that they produced a skewed analysis of only part of the bill because that is what the insurance industry paid them to do.

According to the Post, this latest cattle call for a “respected economist” is part of a “behind-the-scenes effort by the business groups to influence the legislative debate is part of an intensifying series of attacks by the opponents of Democratic health-care plans.” To us, it’s just more phony-baloney.

As the Senate prepares to take up its final health reform legislation this week, it’s also proof that the insurance lobby and their friends won’t let a little thing like “facts” get in the way of their campaign to maintain the status quo.

Last week, the Business Roundtable – which represents the chief executives of major U.S. companies – released a report showing that by 2019, large employers will spend $28,530 on health care costs per employee, 166 percent more than they do today. With the cost containment measures included in health reform legislation, the BRT found that those same large employers stand to save $3,000 per employee.