Health Insurance CEOs to Hand Over the Goods

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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.

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In "It's Not a Crisis. This Is the New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, how brutal it is to sustain quality journalism right now, what makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there, and why support from readers is the only thing that keeps us going. Despite the challenges, we're optimistic we can increase the share of online readers who decide to donate—starting with hitting an ambitious $300,000 goal in just three weeks to make sure we can finish our fiscal year break-even in the coming months.

Please learn more about how Mother Jones works and our 47-year history of doing nonprofit journalism that you don't find elsewhere—and help us do it with a donation if you can. We've already cut expenses and hitting our online goal is critical right now.

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