For-profit health insurance giant WellPoint fired off an email blast to its customers (using its Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield subsidiary) yesterday attacking the public option and Democratic plans for reforming health care, according to Politico’s Ben Smith. The email directs customers to its “grassroots Web site” for instructions on contacting legislators, a website ThinkProgress revealed to be run by the secretive corporate lobbying firm Democracy Data and Communications (DDC). DDC, which is operated by a former veteran of the astroturf organization now known as FreedomWorks, has helped various corporate and Republican interests shape legislation by helping to generate seemingly organic phone calls and letters to Congress.

In the letter to its customers, WellPoint makes a variety of false charges against health reform. Ironically, the attacks WellPoint makes against the public option are more appropriate criticisms of the way the private insurer does business:

1. THE LETTER STATES: Health reform will “increase the premiums of those with private coverage.”

– WELLPOINT POLICIES: In a recent giddy report about WellPoint’s expected profitability to investors, Barrons reported that WellPoint will be “hiking” premiums to at least “6% to 8% annually.” In 2006, WellPoint’s profits increased 34% as premiums and fees surged.

2. THE LETTER STATES: Health reform will cause “millions of Americans to lose their private coverage” and end up in the public option.

– WELLPOINT POLICIES: In March 2007, the state’s Department of Managed Health Care fined Blue Cross of California and its parent company, WellPoint, $1 million after an investigation revealed that the insurer routinely canceled individual health policies of pregnant women and chronically ill patients. Earlier this summer, despite promises by their lobbyists to the public, WellPoint refused to end the controversial practice of rescinding coverage after an applicant files a medical claim.

While WellPoint has been busy shedding customers and increasing premiums, AMNews reported that WellPoint has cut its medical loss ratio this year — meaning a greater percentage of every premium dollar is going to profits and overhead, rather than being spent on actual medical care. Not only that, while WellPoint has tried to put a “human face” on its company by encouraging their employees to show up at town halls with corporate talking points, WellPoint has cut over 1,500 jobs since the beginning of this year. As former CIGNA executive Wendell Potter has explained, private health insurance companies like WellPoint are an ATM machine for Wall Street.

In a recent interview, NPR’s Steve Inskeep forced WellPoint CEO Angela Braly to concede her company fears that “changes in the insurance market and regulations” could cut into her profits the most. That is because, as Igor Volsky has observed, WellPoint’s business model is “antithetical to regulation,” since the company aggressively pursues healthy customers who are less likely to use benefits to pay for medical care. As the company adds healthy customers, WellPoint has made a science of finding ways to deny coverage to the sick. California regulators uncovered more than 1,200 violations of the law by the company in regard to unfair rescission and claims processing practices.

Braly, who earns nearly $10 million a year, wants “sustainable reform,” yet opposes what her company calls “Obamacare,” refuses to stop rescinding coverage to the sick, and is even suspicious of an individual mandate. Although health insurance lobbyists continue to press their case that they truly want reform “this time,” WellPoint and its stealth lobbying efforts severely undermine that claim.

The right-wing, seizing on this report from CBS News, has begun claiming that the health reform bill currently before the House of Representatives will destroy tax privacy as we know it. The provision in question calls for income verification of those claiming the low-income subsidies (which are available for purchasing health insurance) that are established in the bill. “This totally eliminates the idea of tax privacy,” Dick Morris told Fox News’ Greta Van Susteren. “It’s really the equivalent of publishing your tax returns in The Congressional Record. It’s unbelievable!”

Fox also ran a segment today, excoriating Democrats for taking “information for health care, but not for preventing terrorism”:

Even more concerns this morning surrounding the President proposed health care reform bill. Provisions that would force the IRS to give your personal information to a new government health choices commissioner. So Democrats can take Americans’ information for health care, but not for preventing terrorism. Got it?

Watch it:

First, as even Fox’s analyst conceded, it makes sense to verify income for people claiming subsidies. Otherwise the subsidy system would be ripe for fraud and abuse. For an organization so often concerned with the government wasting money, you’d think Fox would be against giving subsidies to those who don’t qualify.

Second, data-sharing of this sort already happens, and from an efficiency standpoint makes perfect sense. Why require persons applying for subsidies to submit another income statement to the government, when the IRS already has the data? As the Georgetown University Health Policy Institute pointed out, state governments access IRS information — among other sources — to verify income for Medicaid and CHIP applicants:

Verifying income using other government databases requires cooperation and coordination with other programs…States typically use four to five databases to confirm income information—Food Stamps, TANF, Social Security, the IRS, and state wage and unemployment compensation programs. Typically, state Medicaid agencies already have access to these databases.

And then there’s this section of the health care bill which expressly forbids use of the information for purposes other than income verification:

(B) RESTRICTION ON USE OF DISCLOSED INFORMATION – Return information disclosed under subparagraph (A) may be used by officers and employees of the Health Choices Administration or such State-based health insurance exchange, as the case may be, only for the purposes of, and to the extent necessary in, establishing and verifying the appropriate amount of any affordability credit described in subtitle C of title II of the America’s Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009 and providing for the repayment of any such credit which was in excess of such appropriate amount.’

All in all, it seems like conservatives are making much ado about nothing.