Report: Insurers Shifting Costs to Avoid Healthcare Laws

[robinblue]

This makes me sick and I really wonder if congress can do anything about it.


http://www.democracynow.org/2010/4/16/headlines



Report: Insurers Shifting Costs to Avoid Healthcare Laws

A Senate panel says some of the nation’s largest insurance companies have begun manipulating their accounting practices to avoid following the new healthcare reform laws. In a new report, the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation says insurers are counting administrative costs as medical costs to avoid requirements on how every premium dollar is spent. The report cites the insurance giant WellPoint as having “‘reclassified’ more than half a billion dollars of administrative expenses as medical expenses.” The news comes as the insurance giant UnitedHealth Group has announced chief executive Stephen Hemsley took home almost $100 million in compensation from exercising stock options last year.

[WeDidIt]

1. Now Obama can sic the SEC on them

and put Wellpoint's CEO and CFO in prison for accounting fraud under the Sarbanes-Oxley act.

[Lerkfish]

2. go ahead and hold your breath on that.

aint gonna happen. Just because there are laws on the books, doesn't mean they'll be enforcedon the rich or powerful (true in any administration)

[WeDidIt]

4. I'll bet a fifty dollar donation to DU that they either correct the accounting

or people are charged with crimes within a year.

[Lerkfish]

5. I don't have an extra fifty dollars, but I doubt anyone will be charged or serve time

changing the accounting is more likely.

[WeDidIt]

6. It will be the fear of being charged or serving time

that forces them to change the accounting.

And that change should come by the end of June because SEC 10K filings require the CFO and CEO to sign off on the accounting. If they are classifying administrative expenses as medical expenses when there are regulatory requirements as to a percentage of income being spent on medical expenses, that fraudulent classification of expense immediately defrauds the investors and is a felony under Sarbanes-Oxley, which holds those two primary officers of a company criminally liable.

They're playing chicken and they'll have to blink because there is nothing to back up their accounting fraud. There are very few things which will put a CEO or CFO of a publicly traded corporation in prison. Accounting fraud is one of them and carries some of the stiffest penalties.

[KG]

3. i'm shocked, SHOCKED!

:eyes:

[dkf]

7. We could have had a public option. Now we just have shenanigans.

This is on Obama's head.

[joe black]

9. Yep

As if he gives a rats ass.

[Solly Mack]

8. K&R

[Lydia Leftcoast]

10. I predicted this kind of thing would happen

Those vultures should be put out of business and their non-executive employees put to work administering a new national health system.