Lieberman's not so tough on insurance

“I’ve never hesitated to take on the insurance industry when I think they’re wrong,†Joe Lieberman insisted when reporters asked him if his opposition to health-care reform has been influenced by all the money he’s been getting from Connecticut’s insurance companies.

The thing is, to Lieberman, the insurance companies are hardly ever wrong, except on two occasions he could cite.

Lieberman said he supported a Patients Bill of Rights opposed by the insurance companies and he did, along with every other Democratic senator and nine Republicans, eight years ago. It wasn’t exactly a controversial bill, but it was never reconciled with a bill passed by the House.

Lieberman’s other crusade against the industry is even less stirring. He once filed a lawsuit against insurers, but that was when he was Connecticut’s attorney general more than 20 years ago — and before the industry gave him a penny of the $1,040,070 he’s received since 1989. (He’s also picked up about $2 million from the pharmaceutical and health products industries and health professionals.)

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But don’t think for a minute this reluctance to take on the insurance industry more than twice means Lieberman hasn’t been for health-care reform in the past. He has, but usually when it didn’t matter. When he ran for re-election in 2006, Lieberman was a health-care champion, boasting he’d been “working on health insurance for more than a dozen years.â€

He apparently forgot how he worked on health-insurance reform the last time it had a chance under a Democratic president in 1993. On that occasion, he rejected the Clinton bill — which didn’t have a public insurance option — as “too big, too bureaucratic, too governmental.â€

With his Halloween threat to filibuster the health-care bill with the Senate Republicans, Lieberman went against the wishes of nearly two-thirds of the state’s voters who support not only health-care legislation but also the public insurance option that would force those insurance giants to offer lower-cost coverage. He also went against Joe Lieberman, who, in 1994, introduced a bill banning the filibuster, saying, “The whole process of individual senators being able to hold up legislation … it’s just wrong.â€

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But worst of all, in announcing his opposition to the public option, Lieberman didn’t know what he was talking about.

“I want to be able to vote for a health bill but my top concern is the deficit,†said the senator, who didn’t seem to know that the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office determined that the House bill that is closest to passage and has the public option would actually reduce the deficit by $100 billion over the next 10 years.

Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman pointed this out in criticizing Lieberman by name with others who “have been attacking proposed legislation for doing things it doesn’t and for not doing things it does.â€

But what if the public option isn’t in the final bill? Will Lieberman’s “top concern†about a deficit be eliminated? Not exactly. Lieberman was interviewed in mid-October on Fox News, one of his favorite news venues, about the mild Senate Finance Committee bill that has no public option.

“I’m afraid that in the end, the Baucus bill is going to raise the price of insurance for most of the people in the country,†said the same Lieberman who was welcomed back to the Democratic Caucus after campaigning against Barack Obama because, said Majority Leader Reid, “He’s with us on everything but the war.â€

Dick Ahles is a retired journalist from Simsbury. E-mail him at dahles@hotmail.com.