Vin Suprynowicz

Congressmen Henry Waxman, D-Calif., and Bart Stupak, D-Mich. have sent a letter to an estimated 52 insurance companies asking them to provide detailed information on their company-funded executive conferences and retreats, as well executive pay for individuals making more than $500,000 per year including salaries, bonuses, stock options, pensions, and percs — both executives and for board members — Fox News reports.

The congressmen also want data on the firms’ annual sales, net income, and dividend payments from 2003 to 2008, including detailed profit breakdowns for all health insurance products the companies have sold.

“The letter comes in the midst of a campaign by Democrats to portray the insurance companies as the villains of the health-care system,” reports Elizabeth MacDonald of Fox Business. “The move could be a back-door arm-twisting measure to remind insurers that opposition to changes to health care could lead to long investigations of the way they do business.”

Even though no one has asserted there’s been any crime or wrongdoing.

Attacks on the insurers, spotlighting supposedly lavish executive pay, have picked up in recent weeks. One such ad (www.swamppolitics.com/news/politics/blog/2009/08/healthcare_reform_executive_pa.html), paid for by the union-sponsored organization Americans United for Change, says “Ed Hanway, CEO of insurance giant Cigna, makes $12.2 million a year. That’s $5,883 an hour. Ed makes more in one day than the average American makes all year long. Now Ed’s retiring with a $73 million golden parachute. …”

Leave aside the fact that Americans used to revel in seeing people work hard and get ahead, noting “I was never offered a job by a poor man.” Leave aside how the unions could possibly know how many hours per week Mr. Hanway works. What about the notion that Mr. Hanway was hired and his salary set by the board members of a private firm who answer to private stockholders, who should be perfectly free to tell anyone who criticizes those decisions to go take a hike?

If the answer is more competition, fine: Let Congress pass a law requiring the states to allow their residents to buy health insurance across state lines, with any coverages they desire — no state mandates as to what has to be covered.

The high-handed approach of Reps. Stupak and Waxman may be well designed to put fear in the hearts of insurance executives and their board of directors, as the congressmen paint pictures for them of crazed mobs with torches storming through the streets, shouting “Get ‘em! They’re rich!”

The problem with this approach as a matter of economic policy is that the Congressional Budget office already looked into the extent to which insurance industry profits impact premiums, in December of 2008, and found that number was less than 3 percent.

Nor is it at all clear that turning the insurance business over to the government would trim costs by that 3 percent. Quite to the contrary, Michael F. Cannon, author of “Healthy Competition: What’s Holding Back Health Care and How to free it,” looked into this question for an Aug. 6 Cato Institute policy paper titled “Fannie Med? Why a ‘Public Option’ Is Hazardous to Your Health,” and concluded “Profits are an important market signal that increase efficiency by encouraging producers to find lower-cost ways of meeting consumers’ needs. The lack of a profit motive could lead a government program to be less efficient than private insurance, not more.”

In fact, Mr. Cannon is overly kind. The Medicare Payment Advisory Commission estimates it made $10.4 billion in improper payments for fee-for-service Medicare programs in 2008. Government programs including Medicare seek to hold administrative costs down by simply not doing much about fraud and mistaken payments, but this “may raise its overall spending relative to a more tightly managed approach,” the Congressional Budget office reports.

But the larger point here is how quickly — now that the federal government feels free to step in and manage stock markets (short-selling, anyone?), banks, even the big auto-makers — congressmen have puffed themselves up with the delusion that they can call virtually any industry on the carpet, set their union allies to work maligning them as “greedy fat cats,” and pretend they and their hired hands can do a better job of managing entire industries, casting aside the competitive free market with its price signals — the system that made ours the richest and most prosperous nation in the world.

Where does Congress find the Constitutional authorization to drag in executives of any industry they wish to take over, insisting that those private parties lay out their firms’ private and proprietary financial information?

Up till now, the excuse had been “They took taxpayer bailout funds.”

But although some LIFE insurance firms — Hartford Financial Services Group, Lincoln national Corp., and Genworth Financial — struck deals last fall to buy regulated savings and loans so they could call themselves “banks” and qualify for federal funds, Fox News reports “So far, the health insurance industry has not received bailout money. …”

You know what? This is really starting to piss me off. Government bureaucrats are guaranteed their 32-hour weeks (try phoning one at 4:30 on a Friday afternoon) and annual pay hikes till they retire at 55 with six-figure pensions, as long as they play it safe, don’t rock the boat, and are smart enough not to post photos of themselves humping little naked children on Facebook. (Don’t laugh; some do. Please send me samples of the ones who get reinstated through “arbitration.”)

Yet for every risk-taking entrepreneur who ends up making a million dollars per year for the last few years of his employment there are hundreds who tried to open an innovative computer company or yogurt stand and fell by the wayside. The hope of profits and wealth are the incentive that motivate entrepreneurs to take the gambles that improve our civilization every day.

Bureaucrats, on the other hand, just loot and “regulate away” the wealth they hate, and then dare to call successful executives on the carpet for “getting rich,” as though this is something they should apologize for? What is this, the People’s Republic of Tajikistan?

If Congress can attack the health insurance industry just because they’d like to take it over — even after the CBO warned the planned government system will be more costly, will cause 15 million Americans to lose their current coverage, and would still leave 16 million Americans without health insurance — what industry will the congressmen choose to attack next?