the only place Greenberg has a reputation is with CNBC and the “Money Honey”

OrionATL..here is a little I pulled up that you might find interesting..

http://www.prwatch.org/node/8441
Obama’s False Friends of Health Reform
Submitted by Wendell Potter on July 1, 2009 – 8:29am.
If you watched the president’s televised Q&A on ABC last Wednesday night, you probably noticed that one of the people in the audience was Ron Williams, the chairman and CEO of Aetna, Inc., the nation’s third largest health insurer, and currently one of the most profitable. But there are a few things that you should know about Williams.

Back in the ’90s, Aetna set out on an acquisition binge in its quest to become the biggest health insurer in the country. It got there by the end of the decade after spending billion of dollars for several competitors. By 1999 it had 21 million health plan members, the most any insurer had ever had at the time.

But, as often happens after buying sprees, Aetna soon came down with a bad case of buyers’ remorse. As it turned out, some of the customers it had paid top price for were not as profitable as Wall Street analysts and the big institutional investors who owned most of Aetna’s stock expected. When they took a closer look at what Aetna had bought, investors started deserting the company in droves. As a result, the company found its stock price in a free fall.

As the Wall Street Journal reported on August 13, 2004, Aetna’s pretax profits as a percentage of revenues began falling dramatically after peaking at about 12 percent in 1998. By 2001 the company was a basket case as far as Wall Street was concerned. It had to do something, and fast.

Probably the most important thing it did to turn itself around was recruit Williams from rival WellPoint, the ambitious for-profit company that was gobbling up Blue Cross and Blue Shield plans from coast to coast.

A final point about Ron Williams: Not only are he and his fellow CEOs trying to kill the idea of a public health insurance option — a central part of candidate Obama’s health care proposal — but he is the leading advocate of an idea Obama rejected and which differentiated his proposal from Hillary Clinton’s — the imposition on all of us of an “individual mandate.” Many insurance executives were wary of such a mandate because they don’t like the government mandating anything, especially those pesky state mandates that force them to include certain benefits in the policies they sell. Advocates of an individual mandate eventually brought the skeptics, including many of AHIP’s board members, around to their way thinking by persuading them that insurers could make billions more in profits if every American had to buy an insurance policy from them. Now you know the real reason behind AHIP’s shift from neutrality on the issue to full-fledged support. It’s all about the money.

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now lets look at this:

http://www.politico.com/politicopulse/

Krugman says health reform ‘may well fail’ if Obama can’t inspire troops – Business Week blares: ‘HEALTH INSURERS HAVE ALREADY WON’
By: CHRIS FRATES & CARRIE BUDOFF BROWN & MIKE ALLEN on August 7, 2009 @ 6:29 AM

SIREN — Business Week’s cover is “WHY HEALTH INSURERS ARE WINNING: The industry, deftly maneuvering behind the scenes in Washington, prepares to profit from health reform,” by Chad Terhune and Keith Epstein.

The online headline is even blunter — “THE HEALTH INSURERS HAVE ALREADY WON”: “As the health reform fight shifts this month from a vacationing Washington to congressional districts and local airwaves around the country, much more of the battle than most people realize is already over. The likely victors are insurance giants such as UnitedHealth Group, Aetna, and WellPoint. The carriers have succeeded in redefining the terms of the reform debate to such a degree that no matter what specifics emerge in the voluminous bill Congress may send to President Obama this fall, the insurance industry will emerge more profitable. Health reform could come with a $1 trillion price tag over the next decade, and it may complicate matters for some large employers. But insurance CEOs ought to be smiling. …

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Diagnosis: Reform

http://www.opensecrets.org/new…..eform.html

Starting in the 2008 election cycle, the health sector has given more money to Democrats–who had seized control of Congress in 2006–than to Republicans, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. This was the first time since the 1992 election cycle, right before the Clinton administration’s failed health care reform attempt, that the health sector made Democrats its financial darlings.

In the 2008 election cycle, the sector gave $90.7 million, or 54 percent of the total, to Democratic candidates and party committees, compared to $76.6 million to Republicans. That difference is even more pronounced in the first three months of 2009, when Democrats collected 60 percent of the total $5.4 million in contributions*. Obama, who made health care reform a large part of his presidential election platform, brought in $18.8 million from the health care sector in the 2008 election cycle–far more than any other presidential hopeful. Money follows power as the industries ride the tides of Obama-styled change.

Health providers, insurers and pharmaceutical companies have taken multiple approaches to winning over the federal lawmakers shaping the legislation. The health sector boosted its campaign contributions compared to the last presidential cycle, to $167.7 million in 2008 from $123.7 million in 2004. The various health industries have also steadily increased their lobbying efforts, from $448.1 million in 2007 to $484.4 million in 2008. So far this year, the sector has paid lobbyists $126.8 million to do its bidding on Capitol Hill. And those expenditures will only increase as the chairs of the five main committees working on health care legislation continue to iron out the details: Will the plan include a government insurance option? Will Congress mandate that all individuals, including the 47 million that are currently uninsured, purchase health insurance? And where will the money come from to pay for the reforms? The health sector–which includes some industries that are diametrically opposed to one another in their answers to these questions–eclipses all other sectors but the financial sector in lobbying spending since 1998, putting $3.4 billion into its efforts.