Sometimes you just can’t take the watch out of the dog.
From Henry Waxman’s latest shop comes this letter, delivered to health insurance company execs, requesting financial disclosures on salary, perks, revenues, and expenditures. It begins:
The Committee on Energy and Commerce is examining executive compensation and other business practices in the health insurance industry.
What a grand idea. And they’re not just asking for bundled totals, companies need to aggregate claims, revenue, expenses, and total profits for the following sectors: the self-insured employer market, the insured employer market, the individual market, and all government programs they’re part of (like Medicare or Medicaid). Which means analysts will get true cost and revenue data over the past four years according to various types of plans. Oooh, a rich dataset to work with, good news for the good guys.