HUFFINGTON POST– The insurance industry’s attempt to weasel out of one of the few provisions of the new health care reform law that took effect immediately is a harbinger of what’s to come. But far from being satisfied with a windfall of new customers and massive government subsidies, the nation’s insurance companies appear to already be busy devising ways to game the new system. Their goal, as ever: Maximizing profits by paying out as little on actual health care as possible. And next time they start to weasel, Congress and the White House – and the media – may not be paying attention anymore.

“This is what you’re going to see as each element in this plan comes up for implementation,” said Marcia Angell, a former editor of The New England Journal of Medicine who now teaches at Harvard Medical School. “This insurance industry is going to give up nothing.” In the short run, companies are expected to keep doing what they’ve been doing, which means, among other things, jacking up their rates. “There’s nothing to stop them from raising their premiums, and that’s what they’re going to do,” said Angell, a supporter of “single-payer” health insurance.

The new law’s ban on discriminating against adults with preexisting conditions doesn’t kick in until 2014. “In the meantime, they can continue to cherry pick the healthiest customers, while foisting the sick into the new high-risk pool,” said Wendell Potter, a former senior health insurance executive at CIGNA who went rogue and became a consumer advocate.

That’s only the beginning, though. “They also will continue to try to shift more and more of the cost of health care from them to the people that are enrolled in their plans,” Potter said. That involves moving people currently in managed care, with its relatively modest co-pays, “out of those plans and into high-deductible plans that make people pay thousands of dollars before the company will pay a dime,” Potter said.

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November 27. 2009

SALON– Earlier this week, Kevin Drum said that “nine times out of ten” Obama’s policies are “pretty much what [he] expected” but that “the biggest one-time-out-of-ten where he’s not doing what [he] expected is in the area of detainee and civil liberties issues.”  Similarly, Andrew Sullivan cited “accountability for war crimes and civil rights” as among the very few issues on which he finds fault with Obama.  Matt Yglesias objects to those observations as follows:

Both Kevin Drum and Andrew Sullivan say they think most people are too hard on Obama, but express disappointment at his record on civil liberties issues. I agree that the civil liberties record hasn’t been exactly what I would have wanted, but I’m continually surprised that people are disappointed in this turn. Of all the things for an incumbent President of the United States to take political risks fighting for, obviously reducing the power of the executive branch is going to be dead last on the list. If you want to see civil liberties championed, that’s going to have to come from congress.

It’s interesting how what was once lambasted as “Constitution-shredding” under George Bush is now nothing more than:  Obama’s “civil liberties record hasn’t been exactly what I would have wanted.”  Also, the premise implicitly embedded in Matt’s argument is the standard Beltway dogma that there would be serious political costs from reversing the Bush/Cheney abuses of the Constitution and civil liberties.  The success of Obama’s campaign — which emphatically and repeatedly vowed to do exactly that  — ought to have permanently retired that excuse. 

Read more at SALON.

By Glenn Greenwald, Salon.com Writer

© SALON 2009

ABC NEWS– In dozens of top-secret talks and meetings in the White House, the most senior Bush administration officials discussed and approved specific details of how high-value al Qaeda suspects would be interrogated by the Central Intelligence Agency, sources tell ABC News.

The so-called Principals who participated in the meetings also approved the use of “combined” interrogation techniques — using different techniques during interrogations, instead of using one method at a time — on terrorist suspects who proved difficult to break, sources said.

Highly placed sources said a handful of top advisers signed off on how the CIA would interrogate top al Qaeda suspects — whether they would be slapped, pushed, deprived of sleep or subjected to simulated drowning, called waterboarding.

The high-level discussions about these “enhanced interrogation techniques” were so detailed, these sources said, some of the interrogation sessions were almost choreographed — down to the number of times CIA agents could use a specific tactic.

The advisers were members of the National Security Council’s Principals Committee, a select group of senior officials who met frequently to advise President Bush on issues of national security policy.

At the time, the Principals Committee included Vice President Cheney, former National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell, as well as CIA Director George Tenet and Attorney General John Ashcroft.

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© ABC NEWS 2008