Today at the Clinton Global Initiative conference, CNBC hosts Mark Haines and Maria Bartiromo interviewed WellPoint CEO Angela Braly on the current health reform debate. Bartiromo pressed Braly on the topic of rescissions, an extremely controversial practice where health insurers find reasons to cancel your coverage when you get sick. “Can you give us an understanding of what factors,” asked Baritomo, “go into denying coverage for a customer?” Rather than answering the question, Braly quickly dodged and started praising her own company for the percent of each premium dollar spent on healthcare (known as the medical loss ratio). But after listening to Braly compliment her company for spending 87 cents per a premium dollar for health “delivery,” CNBC host Haines called her out for essentially lying with “clever” language:

HAINES: I believe you just said very cleverly worded 87 cents of every premium dollar goes to the delivery of healthcare. But in fact why don’t we look at your, the amount of payments you make per dollar you take in. It’s more like 80 cents, is it not? You pay 80 cents in benefits for every dollar. [...]

BARTIROMO: According to your 10k, the number is more like 80 or 81 cents.

BRALY: Yeah I’m citing a Pricewaterhouse Coopers study for the industry overall. 87 cents on the dollar is going to healthcare costs, in the industry–

HAINES: Well there you go again, that’s too cleverly worded. Going to healthcare costs? [...]

BRALY: Relative to other margins in the healthcare industry — biotech’s at 18, pharma’s at 16 — you know really we’re a low cost, low margin provider in the healthcare equation.

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Haines was correct in calling out Braly’s deceptive language: WellPoint certainly does not spend 87 cents of every premium dollar on actual healthcare. In their 2nd quarter disclosures, WellPoint reportedly spent only 82.9% of every premium dollar on benefits, the remainder went to administrative costs, executive compensation (Braly herself makes approximately $10 million a year) and profits. The amount of every premium dollar spent on healthcare for WellPoint has actually been decreasing, while WellPoint has signaled they plan to be “hiking” premiums to at least “6% to 8% annually.” Although Braly likes to pretend that private insurers currently are a “low margin provider,” the truth is traditional Medicare’s administrative costs are only about 2%.

It is also no wonder Braly would want to dodge the question about rescissions. Earlier this summer, an executive from WellPoint testifying under oath specifically refused to “commit” to ending this practice, despite lofty claims to the contrary by insurance industry public relations professionals.

Indeed, WellPoint is refusing to end this immoral practice because rescissions are built into its business model. WellPoint reportedly provides monetary rewards for employees who successfully rescind the coverage of its customers and lists about 1,400 conditions as reasons for rescinding care. Three insurers alone (WellPoint, UnitedHealth and Assurant) canceled more than 20,000 policies in the last five years, saving the companies $300 million.

Editor’s note: The Wonk Room is reporting from the Clinton Global Initiative conference this week. This is our second post.

As I noted yesterday, one of the main thrusts of this year’s Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) conference is building up human capital. To that end, CGI brought together a rather eclectic group of individuals to discuss investing in women and girls as a way of bolstering human capital worldwide. The group included the CEO’s of both Goldman Sachs and Exxon Mobil, alongside Zainab Salbi, the CEO of Women for Women International, Robert Zoellick, the president of the World Bank, and Melanne Verveer, Ambassador-at-Large for Women’s Issues at the U.S. State Department.

Prior to the panel, former President Bill Clinton explained that, globally, women do two-thirds of the work, produce 50 percent of the food, but earn just ten percent of the income and own just one percent of the property. And when Exxon’s CEO Rex Tillerson asserted that “funding is not the issue” that keeps women and girls worldwide from gaining access to education and other opportunities that would boost their incomes, Salbi pointed out that less than one cent out of every dollar spent on development is being invested in girls:

But women still get very small, women and girls, get so very small, minuscule amount of funding…One cent of every development dollar, less than one cent goes to girls. So when you look at the larger scope of development money and how much is being invested in so many other things, women and girls get the least amount of funding. Money is not the problem in terms of if it’s available, but the political decision to say we need to invest much more in girls and women is not fully there yet.

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That’s an awfully low percentage, especially considering the multiplier effect that investment in education for women can have. Plan International Australia found that “investing in girls is one of the best ways to end poverty, because women who are educated are likely to reinvest up to 90 per cent of their income in their family.” Plus, according to research from the World Bank, “economic growth is boosted by the number of girls who complete their secondary education and go on to earn higher wages,” which can be 10 to 20 percent higher with each year of secondary schooling.

As former President Jimmy Carter said, “the evidence shows that investing in women and girls delivers major benefits for society. An educated woman has healthier children. She is more likely to send them to school. She earns more and invests what she earns in her family. It is simply self-defeating for any community to discriminate against half its population.” And if, as Salbi says, it is just a matter of political will to get dollars to the right place, then pressure in the right places could work to turn the tide.