Farewell. The Flying Pig Has Left The Building.

Steve Hynd, August 16, 2012

After four years on the Typepad site, eight years total blogging, Newshoggers is closing it's doors today. We've been coasting the last year or so, with many of us moving on to bigger projects (Hey, Eric!) or simply running out of blogging enthusiasm, and it's time to give the old flying pig a rest.

We've done okay over those eight years, although never being quite PC enough to gain wider acceptance from the partisan "party right or wrong" crowds. We like to think we moved political conversations a little, on the ever-present wish to rush to war with Iran, on the need for a real Left that isn't licking corporatist Dem boots every cycle, on America's foreign misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq. We like to think we made a small difference while writing under that flying pig banner. We did pretty good for a bunch with no ties to big-party apparatuses or think tanks.

Those eight years of blogging will still exist. Because we're ending this typepad account, we've been archiving the typepad blog here. And the original blogger archive is still here. There will still be new content from the old 'hoggers crew too. Ron writes for The Moderate Voice, I post at The Agonist and Eric Martin's lucid foreign policy thoughts can be read at Democracy Arsenal.

I'd like to thank all our regular commenters, readers and the other bloggers who regularly linked to our posts over the years to agree or disagree. You all made writing for 'hoggers an amazingly fun and stimulating experience.

Thank you very much.

Note: This is an archive copy of Newshoggers. Most of the pictures are gone but the words are all here. There may be some occasional new content, John may do some posts and Ron will cross post some of his contributions to The Moderate Voice so check back.


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Saturday, October 9, 2010

Why are Insurers Supporting the GOP?

By John Ballard


From Dr. McCanne's blog at PNHP...



Well, that didn�t last long. The insurance industry supported the Democrats just long enough to get passed into law their one policy proposal made in insurance heaven: a mandate for everyone to purchase their private insurance products. Now that we have to buy their plans, they want Republican-style market reforms to make sure that their insurance products are not priced totally out of the market, even if that leaves health care itself unaffordable.


What are these measures that Republicans support and that Democrats don�t?



  • Insurers want to be able to sell their plans across state lines. By opening up markets in the less regulated states, insurers can sell more competitively priced products, even if they provide patients less protection against loss.

  • They want to sell less expensive, high-deductible plans linked to health savings accounts that attract their favored healthier and wealthier clientele, even if it harms the sick by pushing them into more expensive, higher-risk insurance pools.

  • They want to increase wasteful taxpayer subsidies of their private Medicare Advantage plans in order to create incentives to shift more patients from our government Medicare program into their own industry plans.

  • They want relief from having to insure high-needs, high-cost patients. They would do this by shifting the burden to taxpayer-financed high-risk insurance pools or reinsurance programs.

    • Anybody surprised?
  • They don�t want to be exposed to some of the transitional programs such as requiring coverage of children with preexisting disorders.

  • They want to be sure that required �standard benefits� are defined as loosely as possible to protect their market of low cost products, even if those products fail to provide adequate protection.

  • They want to be sure that rules for waivers will be applied liberally so that they can continue to offer innovative products such as the mini-med plans for McDonald�s employees that have basic benefits paying a maximum of $2,000 per year, or up to $10,000 maximum per year for the deluxe plan. (These plans are a cruel hoax.)

  • They want to be sure that overall regulatory oversight will be relaxed as much as possible so that the free market can offer the highest quality insurance products at the very best prices (sic).



Is anyone surprised....?
BTW, anyone who thinks the mandate will get repealed is living in a fool's paradise. Insurance money will insure that nothing will touch that part of HCR.



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