Insurance Industry, This is Your Choice

Camryn Hansen

Contributor

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Today, Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius directly confronted America’s Health Insurance Plans with a choice. I don’t think any of us could have said it better:

So you have a choice. You can choose to continue your opposition to reform. If you do and reform goes down in defeat, we know what will happen. By next March, premiums will be taking an even bigger bite out of Americans' wages. More Americans will lose the security of employer-sponsored insurance. More small businesses will be forced to shut down or cancel their employees' coverage. Parents and children with pre-existing conditions will continue to be shut out of the insurance market. And Americans will continue to live in fear of the next letter from their insurer announcing the latest premium hike. (…)

Then there is your other choice.

You can choose to take the millions of dollars you have stored away for your next round of ads to kill meaningful reform, and use them to start giving Americans some relief from their skyrocketing premiums. Instead of spending your energy attacking the parts of the President's proposal you don't like, you can use it to strengthen the parts you do. –USA Today

Kathleen Sebelius is absolutely right. The longer insurance companies and the politicians whose careers they fund continue to obstruct the way to meaningful reform, the longer hard-working Americans will be forced to live in fear for their families’ futures. If only we could all speak out so boldly against the insurance industry and its supporters, who only have these millions to spend against reform in the first place because for decades, they’ve been milking us Americans for everything we have.