Regional news: 
Justice Dept. orders storm troopers to review health insurance mergers
Tony Ondrusek is founder and publisher of Insurance & Financial Advisor and IFAwebnews.com.
It’s not surprising that the Obama Administration has pulled out all the stops to pass health care reform. After all, President Obama went on the record numerous times during his campaign announcing his dream of universal health care in the U.S., eventually forcing all Americans to adhere to one health coverage plan, in the same way all Americans must buy flood insurance through the federal government.
But what is surprising is the brazen nature and swift clamp down on free enterprise used to enact Obama’s vision of socialized medicine.
In one fell swoop, the Obama Administration has effectively taken away the rights of states to regulate intrastate commerce, and supervise health insurance companies doing business within their borders, whether or not they are involved in interstate trade.
A top dog at the U.S. Justice Department, Christine Varney, has said that her office will “block” mergers of health insurers that the Administration finds might impede implementation of the new health reform law, according to an article on IFAwebnews.com.
Varney, who has had success in scuttling proposed business mergers, says that anti-trust laws allow her to effectively end proposed mergers without any input from state insurance departments.
Have state insurance regulators been told yet that their authority in this arena has been reduced to that of an observer, and that their responsibility to review and approve or deny mergers has been taken away, without being notified?
States have done a good job in regulating health insurance mergers, and maintaining competitive marketplaces. Certainly, there are states where competition is not optimal, and in some cases the argument for a merger has been denied, such as one in the past dealing with CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield of Maryland, or the denied merger of Highmark and Independence Blue Cross in Pennsylvania.
But, according to Varney, it is now up to the federal government — and her division, in particular — to determine how companies should operate within states.
And her logic makes sense, at least when viewed through the lens of one who favors a socialized economy.
“The ultimate goal of health care reform,” she said, is “to harness the power of competition, together with regulation,” to expand coverage, improve quality and control costs.
Competition and regulation in the same sentence? Where do states rights fit into that equation? And is she talking about quality and cost control along the same lines as Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and the IRS, all federal programs that provide nothing but the finest in services and ROI for the American people?
2 Responses
- Harry Cylinder Says:
May 27th, 2010 at 8:12 pm“Storm troopers” is more than a little excessive. Last time I checked, no one at the Justice Department was wearing brown shirts. Where are the concetration camps? The arbitrary arrests? The murders? There is a line between criticism and demonization, and your headline crossed it.
- Tony Ondrusek Says:
May 28th, 2010 at 12:14 amWhen the federal government effectively yanks rights away from the states to regulate its own business matters, when the power to terminate the business dealings of private enterprise is wrestled away from citizens and concentrated within one division of the nearly autonomous Justice Department, when the person who has all that power says that merging competition and state-mandated regulation is good for an economy, and when that same person says that she will block any effort to thwart the implementation of socialized health care…I don’t think that “storm trooper” is too harsh a word.
There are those who call terrorists and would-be terrorists criminals instead of murderers, when the latter is the better description.
Disagree with the term, but there is no arguing that extreme and heavy-handed tactics are the tools of a government that is wielding far too much power.
