Big Insurance Gives Hillary a Half Million Dollar Donation
Posted by thebagofhealthandpolitics on February 26, 2008
I have a headache, so this post will be on the shorter side. Presidential candidates were required to disclose their campaign debts recently. Hillary Clinton’s debt report was interesting. Two outstanding items are $215,000 to AETNA for health insurance for her staff and $299,000 to BlueCross for health insurance for her staff.
Here we have a candidate who wants to mandate insurance on American workers and small businesses who can’t afford to pay her campaign’s own health care premiums. I also want to know why the debt has been allowed to linger. If I miss my insurance payments, my insurance gets cancelled. If a small business misses their insurance payments, their employees’ insurance gets cancelled.
Big health insurance has allowed Hillary Clinton’s campaign to fall a half a million dollars behind in their insurance premiums. Big insurance is basically making an in-kind donation to Hillary Clinton’s campaign by providing a service for free. The pay off—their fondest dream is to rip off working Americans with a mandate for junk high deductible insurance—they expect must be pretty large.
This raises another question—if the Hillary Clinton for President campaign, a $140 million enterprise, cannot afford its health insurance premiums, how will small businesses and workers who make $60,000 a year be able to afford theirs? Big insurance knows this, which is why they haven’t cancelled her staff’s premiums. Mandates simply take money out of the pockets of working Americans and into the pockets of insurance executives.
This entry was posted on February 26, 2008 at 9:50 pm and is filed under Barack Obama, Healthcare, Hillary, Hillary's Health Care Charade. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Barb said
You are wronge on several points, most notable healthcare mandates. Mandates benefit less then 2% of the population, and they are very expensive for every one especialy insurance companies, and they are the reason so many insureance companies are going out of buisness or being bought up by Aetna and the Blue. It is more likely that the reason that Hillays campaine is allowed to carrie this balance is that they are possitioning themselves to be national adiministrators of her national healthcare, thus eliminating their competition. This would be a goverment sanctioned monopoly.
The Bag of Health and Politics said
I am no fan of mandates. And they may indeed hurt the smaller insurance companies. But the fact is there’s nothing the big conglomerates like United Health Care would like more than to have a mandate where wages are garnished (sent directly to the CEO or whomever is pilfering stock options these days) and people get crapola high deductible plans where they never see any real benefit for their lost wages. (Very few people use up a $2,500 deductible). The result of a mandate would be to force people into these–extremely cheap and not very good for the patient–plans.
As for BlueCross allowing Hillary to carry a balance because there’s something in it for them in the end (ditto for AETNA) this should be illegal if it isn’t already. It’s clearly a terrible ethics violation, and it says big insurance is already running the show in Hillary’s campaign.
Anonymous said
How could mandates possibly hurt insurance companies? The mandates are mandating every citizen to get the insurance even if they don’t qualify for subsidies and even if they feel they can’t afford it.
Of course insurance companies like it, it means they get premiums from everyone
The Bag of Health and Politics said
Anonymous, you nailed it. Insurance companies want mandates, which is why this “loan” has been granted to Hillary.
Colorado Property Insurance said
Hillary Rodham Clinton’s cash-strapped presidential campaign has been putting off paying hundreds of bills for months — freeing up cash for critical media buys but also earning the campaign a reputation as something of a deadbeat in some small-business circles…and i agree with anonymous, th eonly reason this loan was available to her, is because they wan m.a.n.d.a.t.e.s!!!
great post enjoyable read!
cheers.
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