Were ready to reconvene. Senator klobuchar is next. Thank you very much, mr. Chairman. I talked a little bit about the Health Insurance consolidation and i know we had some quick answers there from both of you. We have a little more luxury of time now, so if you could, finish up, mr. Swedish. I was asking you, remember, about why you needed the merger to achieve some of these cost goals that you have. Thank you for the followup question. What id like to do is maybe describe to you the various products and services that we do offer in terms of how we segment our business. This is a highly segmented industry that then serves a very focused effort in and around the local markets. For instance, we are very active, as is cigna, in the National Marketplace serving Large National accounts. These are very sophisticated highly educated buyers of Health Care Services typically using consultants who they rely upon to make the selections for the health plan that will serve them in the National Mar
In the bucket that compares to the challenge that is likely to come. Am i wrong . Is that a strategy thats the wrong way to go about it . Im not sure you would get a majority of votes in this body for it. I think the vote we had about using military force against the use of chemical weapons against civilians barely got a majority in this committee and likely will not get a majority in the senate or in the house. Still if the administration were to advocate strongly for it, there is some bipartisan support for the notion. As folks who do this work, am i looking at this wrong . Senator cain, i have long wrestled with this question through this crisis. You know, the history of safe zones and nofly zones for humanitarian purposes is fraught with cases where it didnt work well and its filled with moral hazard. And at the same time i think that as the crisis progresses and the level of killing continues that is prompting this level of crisis for us to continue to not take some action that is
Thank you all for being here today and the excellent testimony you have offered so far. I am deeply concerned about these mergers because of the potential effect on competition and the concentration of power in fewer hands. Ive expressed those concerns publicly in some sense. I have a feeling that like the saying about marriage that this merger may be the triumph of hope over experience, the experience that is suggested by a lot of the scholarship done in this area is consolidation is so rapidly taking over this industry. We have seen it in other industries and we have seen the consequences of it in higher prices and in this case potentially higher premiums. And i am deeply troubled by the evidence that shows that neither providers nor consumers benefit from these consolidations. In other words, that the prudential aetna experience shows that premiums are not lower, consumers do not benefit, and that the savings are not passed along to consumers. When viewed together, i think both of t
Street. Weve had cases in which we did testing. In the testing much like during the lunch counters in the 1960s. We sent welltrained people into Police Departments to ask for the form to complain about police misconduct. I can tell you go on the internet and i love google. Go on the internet and google these cases and what youll see is a young man well trained asking nicely for the report to fill out, but when they stood there, first, the desk sergeant said i wont give you a form unless you tell me what to complain about. He said i dont want to talk about it now. I want to take it home and fill it out. The sergeant said, i wont let you do that until you tell me. Its my responsibility to oversee the Police Officers. He said it nicely, i dont want to talk about it now. I just, police, sir, want to take it home and fill it out. While this was going on another Police Walked out the back door of the police station. He went around the corner to come in the front door. At the time the young m
Important topics. That is coming up in october. We have a giant delegation, both government and civil society, planning to go. If youre interested, youre all invited. Certainly lots of topics important to us will be discussed. So back to open data and the United States. I mentioned that in 2013, president obama issued an open order eo, executive order, for default information. Accompanying that was the open data policy, which we refer to as m1313 for you government nerds in the room. That directs agencies to manage information as an asset. And of course that doesnt happen overnight, right . For the last two years we have been working really hard with our agencies to move towards managing information as an asset. So i mentioned data. Gov. There is a screen shot of the data. Gov home page. 160,000 data sets across all sectors. The data. Gov site has incredible resources and is fantastic if you havent spent much time there. Another effort that we that the administration launched into quic