Paul Waldman on the insurance industry’s self-defeating campaign against the public option:
For months, the insurance industry was remarkably quiet. Despite fears that it would publicly fight reform with a scorched-earth campaign of television ads like it did in 1993, until now it’s been subdued. It was part of a carefully planned inside-outside strategy: On the outside, the industry constantly stressed its support of reform, while noting that it objected to some of reform’s potential components, like the public option. On the inside, it was furiously lobbying to make sure the bill would maximize its profits and minimize its costs.
Outside the halls of Congress — and even inside those halls — few took notice. Until last week, when the industry’s lobbying group, America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP) released a study it had commissioned attacking the bill about to be passed by the Senate Finance Committee. They claimed the bill would increase costs, resulting in skyrocketing premiums for consumers. The report was quickly eviscerated for its methodological howlers, including the fact that it pretended that the subsidies the bill grants to low- and middle-income Americans didn’t exist.
