By Katie Jacob

Copy Editor

At his news conference July 22, Obama said that health insurance reform is central to rebuilding the economy. He pointed out that 14,000 Americans lose their health insurance every single day. One of the reasons Americans lose their health care is because the insurance industry doesn’t want to pay for it.

For example, take the practice of rescission. When a customer — a paying customer, someone who has been paying his premiums all along — gets sick and makes a claim, health insurance companies employ people (or computers) to search their records and see if there are any pre-existing conditions that could disqualify the customer from coverage. The pre-existing condition could be something as simple as a teenage bout with acne, which has nothing to do with say, cancer, but oops, you neglected to tell them about it? You and your cancer treatment are on your own.

This LA Times article documents how Blue Cross of California encouraged its employees to cancel the health insurance policies of customers with expensive illnesses.

Former Cigna executive Wendell Potter testified before the Senate Commerce committee in June and said that insurance companies try to “confuse their customers and dump the sick so they can satisfy their Wall Street investors with big profits.”

Potter told the senators on the committee, including several Democratic senators who are opposing a public optionthat could compete with the private insurance companies and keep them honest, as Obama has put it:

“I know from personal experience that members of Congress and the public have good reason to question the honesty and trustworthiness of the insurance industry. Insurers make promises they have no intention of keeping, they flout regulations designed to protect consumers, and they make it nearly impossible to understand–or even to obtain–information we need. As you hold hearings and discuss legislative proposals over the coming weeks, I encourage you to look very closely at the role for-profit insurance companies play in making our health care system both the most expensive and one of the most dysfunctional in the world.” (You can read the transcript of his testimony here.)

You can also watch this video of CEOs from Well Point, Inc., United Health Group and Assurant “refusing to stop screwing their customers” while testifying before Congress (H/T blogger dday at dailykos).

The United States now devotes one-sixth of its economy to health care. Health insurance costs are on average about $15,000 per year for a family of four, about $6,500 more than in other advanced countries, according to The New York Times, and yet we are ranked 37 by the World Health Organization for health care outcomes.

A CBS News/New York Times Poll indicates that 72 percent of Americans want a government-sponsored health care plan to compete with private insurance. According to that poll most believe that the government would do a better job than private insurance in keeping costs down.

At the press conference Wednesday, Obama said this about the need for health care reform:

This is not just about the 47 million Americans who have no health insurance. Reform is about every American who has ever feared that they may lose their coverage if they become too sick, or lose their job, or change their job. It’s about every small business that has been forced to lay off employees or cut back on their coverage because it became too expensive. And it’s about the fact that the biggest driving force behind our federal deficit is the skyrocketing cost of Medicare and Medicaid.

Yet surprisingly, members of his own party are opposing him on health care.

The Democrats took single-payer health care off the table from the beginning. Max Baucus, D-Mont., the powerful chairman of the Senate Finance committee, one of two Senate committees charged with producing a health care bill, said he now regrets taking single payer off the table, but that it is too late to do anything about it.

Baucus has been lobbied heavily by the health care industry and has emerged as a leading recipient of Senate campaign contributions “from the hospitals, insurers and other medical interest groups hoping to shape the legislation to their advantage” according to an article in The Washington Post. According to one Senate aide, “It’s a parade of lobbyists going in and out of that office every day.”

And Democrats — not just Republicans, in both the House and the Senate are coming out in opposition to even a public option, in spite of the fact that they ran in 2008 on a party platform of “guaranteed” access to affordable health care.

Single payer would go a long way toward solving the problem of high health care costs. But the health insurance industry is pouring millions of dollars into the campaign coffers of conservative Democrats who think it’s more important to protect their interests than the interests of the American people.

Congressman John Conyers, speaking at the National Press Club July 24 said this about a single-payer option:

“We are the richest country in the world and our doctors and medical facilities are the envy of our neighbors. Yet, our broken private insurance system burdens our business community and allows many of our fellow citizens to suffer or die unnecessarily. Two-thirds of our nation’s personal bankruptcies can be attributed directly to medical expenses. A single-payer system will allow us to cover everyone without spending any more money than we do now.

Conyers has been a long-time advocate of single-payer national health insurance reform and his bill (H.R.676) has 80 co-sponsors. You read about HR676 at www.johnconyers.com/hr676faq .