Justice Breyer: Health Care Reform Could Appear Before Supreme Court (VIDEO)

*yawns*.......

a 2.2 percent profit margin last year, placing them 35th on the Fortune 500 list of top industries.
BFD.

2.2% of how much? If it's 1 Trillion, that's 22 Billion in profit.
And a sizable chunk of that really ought to be part of the medical loss, given rescission and other sleight-of-hand.

Look at it this way: 30 years ago health insurance companies were non-profit. If they remained non-profit, how much would it save the country off its health care bill?

I heard an interview with Cigna a couple of weeks ago, and the CEO acknowledged that in 2009 his company alone earned $18 billion in profits and managed to pay its Chairman $125 million. Does that bother you? If one company earned $18 billion in profits, how much does the rest of the industry earn.

The trouble with "profits" in the case of health insurance is that the decisions made with respect to coverage are based on shareholder needs and not on medical facts. The incentive is all warped. Doesn't make any difference whether the profit margin is 2.2% or 15%.

The CEO of United Health Care made about $100 million this year.

It sounds like his company is doing fine.

@nomad28,

I've seen this profit margin argument before (I think on Crooks and Liars), and I believe that the way the health insurance companies have to account for their reserve requirements (i.e., the money they have to hold in reserve, just in case) depresses their "earnings" but they still have the money. In other words, looking at the profit margin alone does not tell you the whole story of how profitable and wealthy the companies actually are.

Another way to think of it: if the health insurance companies are run so poorly that they have such a crappy profit margin, how come they keep giving their executives such hefty raises?

Everybody needs to check his filters when reviewing each side's talking points.

GTFOOH - NOW!!!

Only thugs would have the nerve to worry about insurance companies who are probably the richest companies in the fucking world.

How do you cons justify the enormous paychecks that health insurance CEOs get?

You simply cannot compare profit margins from one industry to the other. They may earn only 2%, but they also carry no inventory, make no products and have little overhead. In addition, 80% of the cash flow is just from policyholders to providers. A more comparable (to other industries) calculation of profit margin would exclude payments to providers and calculate the profit margin only on the remaining 20%, which would make their profit margin above 10%.

However, if your argument is that premiums are not as high as they are because of profits, then you're correct. If they eliminated their profits entirely premiums would decline by only 2%.

Do those other corporations decide who they will let buy their products? Do they ask for their products back without a refund whenever they feel like it? Do they have a division in their companies dedicated to denying their customers the service or product they produce?

So, you know what they do, they pay top level executives 100's of millions of dollars to depress the total earnings since salaries are taken out as costs.

That's the dumbest argument ever man, learn something before you parrot some high level fox talking point, there is usually something significant that undermines it within a google search's distance

and yet they always have millions to pay for lobbying against reform, advertising, and paying at least some of their executives tens of millions.
Gee, can't imagine why anyone might have a bad impression of them. Maybe if you weren't just parroting wingnut talking points and braindead stereotypes about the evil "liberals" you might actually understand this.

You are obviously a Repuglican and are therefore numerically and factually challanged. In your FakeNews analysis of healthcare industry profits, you failed to define how those profits are calculated. You see, the devil is in the details. So here is some education on how those numbers were fudged so that you can make the uninformed rant that you made on this thread.

Insurers are measuring their profits against total health care spending, not total company revenues. So the 2.2% profit margin you mentioned is misleading and therefore false in the context of your argument or rant. The 2.2% does not take into account the revenues generated by these companies, just the cost of healthcare spending in relation to their administration costs, marketing costs and profit taking. If you add back the revenue totals for the year, their profit margin is substantially higher in relation to costs. Insurance companies actually take 15-20% right off the top of each insurance premium for profit, marketing and Administrative Costs (which is code for we need to pay our CEO at a low of $2.3 million at Cigna and as high as $38.8 million for Cigna CEO., with a 5 year payout ranging from $57million to $120 million for one CEO at Cigna.)

And if their profit forecast projection was so low, how was the industry able to afford spending $1.4 million per day to fight HCR. Because they are fudging the profit forecast by removing profit from the calculation of total revenues at the top.

Additionally, you are ignoring how poorly healthcare stocks performed in 2008 which affected their profit projections for 2009 and this year. Do you know the reason for the poor stock performance? Because of how the last administration screwed the economy and federal budget with out of control spending under a conservative White House with 2 unpaid for wars not included in the federal budget, but passed through reconciliation so that the cost was not on the books. All Republicans are good at is lying, fudging and making up stories to suit your small worldview.

So next time, get your facts straight, because you Republicans always try to vilify liberals because it fits into your worlview (you got that straight from FakeNews. Additionally just because I may have healthcare from my company, they cannot afford to give me a raise in 5 years because Healtcare premiums kept rising faster than inflation. Our company healthcare premiums are 200% higher than 5 years ago. For you mathematically challenged, that is a 40% increase annually year over year. That is why HCR is necessary.

Sure that's what they "posted" but dig a little deeper and you will see that the real number is closer t0 40%. Not to mention they pay their CEOs upwards of 8 figures.

ONLY 35th in the FORTUNE 500?! Yeah, time to feel sorry for those poor persecuted minorities without voices – your wildly profitable yet dysfunctional heath insurance provider.

Worked for 2 different insurance companies in my life so don't even try to tell me they are not run by scumbags who take huge salaries and cheat their clients. I've been there and seen it up close.

Awww. Poowar heawfcawe monopowees. Did you know they only were listed 35th on the Fortune 100? We bedda do something that. They are exempt from anti-trust laws and they're barely scraping by. Now I feel so much better being mandated to pay my regional corporate monopoly now. Maybe with this healthcare bill we can finally get them into the teens on the Fortune 100 next year??

He didn't opine that it may be unconstitutional. It doesn't give the exact quote, but it looks like he simply said it may be a good candidate for review. This would make some sense because numerous states are challenging the constitutionality and it would be good to get this issue resolved once and for all.

There is no way that Breyer would think this is unconstitutional. He's one of the good ones on the court, and has seemed pretty comfortable with a broad reading of the commerce clause in the past.