Last September, ThinkProgress reported that, despite its public support for health care reform, the insurance industry was engaged in a “duplicitous” campaign to undermine the effort. Now the National Journal has confirmed that from September to December 2009, “six of the nation’s biggest health insurers began quietly pumping big money into third-party television ads aimed at killing or significantly modifying the major health reform bills moving through Congress.” The companies used America’s Health Insurance Plans — the lobbying arm of the insurance industry — “as a conduit to avoid a repeat of the political flack that hit the insurance industry after it famously ran its multi-million dollar ‘Harry and Louise’ ads to help kill health care reforms during the Clinton administration”:

That money, between $10 million and $20 million, came from Aetna, Cigna, Humana, Kaiser Foundation Health Plans, UnitedHealth Group and Wellpoint, according to two health care lobbyists familiar with the transactions. The companies are all members of the powerful trade group America’s Health Insurance Plans. The funds were solicited by AHIP and funneled to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to help underwrite tens of millions of dollars of television ads by two business coalitions set up and subsidized by the chamber. Each insurer kicked in at least $1 million and some gave multi-million dollar donations.

Watch a compilation of some of these ads:

The industry’s covert ad campaign isn’t the industry’s only means of wasting millions of premium dollars on sabotaging reform. As former health insurance executive Wendell Potter told ThinkProgress, insurers are using a variety of front groups to advance a hidden attack campaign. The industry regularly feeds talking points to right-wing media like Rush Limbaugh and Fox News, mobilizes anti-reform “grassroots” groups and coordinates with conservative think-tanks to produce academic-appearing reports to advance their cause.

The insurance industry has also funded state efforts to challenge the constitutionality of health reform. Insurers have “spent heavily on political contributions” in the 14 states seeking to ratify constitutional amendments that would repeal all or parts of the new measure and contributed thousands of dollars to the attorneys generals seeking to disqualify reform. Earlier this month, Lee Fang reported that Blue Cross Blue Shield Association “played a pivotal role in crafting this anti-health reform states’ rights initiative.”

National Journal’s report should be the last nail in the coffin of AHIP’s public charm campaign. Throughout the health care debate, AHIP President and CEO Karen Ignagni repeatedly reassured the public that insurers were committed to health care reform and even produced a plan for reforming the system. “We understand that we have to earn a seat at the table,” Ignagni told Obama during the White House Health Summit in March 2009. “You have our commitment to play, to contribute, and to help pass health care reform this year,” she promised.

Even after the industry sponsored several reports criticizing reform legislation, AHIP always reiterated the insurance industry’s “commitment” to reforming the health system. “We don’t want to let Americans down. It’s very important. We promised that we are committed to this. Our industry is for-square behind it, but we have an obligation to explain how to make that happen,” Ignagni told Congress in October, as her industry was donating millions of dollars to defeat reform. In fact, insurers have long been dues-paying members of the Chamber. AETNA has given $100,000 to the Chamber, while Unitedhealth Group payed at least $20,000.

Cross-posted at the Wonk Room.

American Bankers Association CEO Edward Yingling

Edward Yingling, president and chief executive, American Bankers Association: “To impose yet another burden on the industry would obviously decrease their ability to lend.”

Scott Talbott, head of government affairs, Financial Services Roundtable: “Placing additional taxes on top of the new regulatory burdens will stifle the industry just as the economy is beginning to recover.“

Yingling also referred to the proposal as “perplexing,” while another banker called it an “absurd idea.” The main argument coming from the banks is that they either already have or are in the process of paying back TARP, and that any losses are going to come from either the automakers or AIG.

However, as Tim Fernholz pointed out, the TARP law does stipulate that any losses be recouped from the banks. “This began long before everyone started gearing up for the next cycle of bonus madness as an obviously needed response to the bank bailouts,” he wrote. A revenue-raising mechanism to fit this requirement has been under debate for some time within Treasury, so the bankers don’t have much of a leg to stand on.

Still, I don’t understand why the administration is making this about recouping TARP, in isolation, when it could be using this as an opportunity to talk about TARP and every other extraordinary step that the government took to rescue the financial system. Obama and the Treasury can remind the banks — and everyone else — about FDIC guarantees, and allowing investment firms to convert into bank-holding companies with cheap access to loans, among many other actions. The banks’ survival — and their ability to make huge profits so soon after they were staring into the abyss — did not start and end with TARP, and neither should their debt to taxpayers be satisfied solely by paying back their TARP funding.

There are plenty of other ways to raise revenue from the banks — including a transactions tax or taxing bonuses — but the administration has been intently shooting those ideas down. Still, the financial services industry, which handles about $50 trillion of transactions per year, can afford to pay higher fees and taxes, in one way or another. So if the administration is going to put its eggs in the “recouping the bailout” basket, it should make sure that the banks can’t portray themselves as victims of an unreasonable levy by reminding everyone just how extensive the effort to save the financial system really was.

On Saturday, the New York Times reported that the “bank bonus season” that begins this week “will be one of the largest and most controversial blowouts the industry has ever seen.” “Despite calls for restraint from Washington and a chafed public, resurgent banks are preparing to pay out bonuses that rival those of the boom years. The haul, in cash and stock, will run into many billions of dollars,” reported the Times.

The reality that banks aren’t “taking immediate steps to reduce bonuses substantially” led former Citigroup CEO John Reed to slam the banks for learning nothing from the financial crisis:

Even some industry veterans warn that such paydays could further tarnish the financial industry’s sullied reputation. John S. Reed, a founder of Citigroup, said Wall Street would not fully regain the public’s trust until banks scaled back bonuses for good — something that, to many, seems a distant prospect.

“There is nothing I’ve seen that gives me the slightest feeling that these people have learned anything from the crisis,” Mr. Reed said. “They just don’t get it. They are off in a different world.”

But some prominent New Yorkers are defending Wall Street’s compensation packages. On Don Imus’ radio show this morning, former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani declared that from his point of view giant Wall Street bonuses are “wonderful”:

GIULIANI: I have to tell you. You’re going to get annoyed. I have a different view of bonuses than you do.

IMUS: Ok.

GIULIANI: And this comes from my experience as mayor of New York. They balance my budget. They were wonderful from the point of view of getting the money you need to run New York City. Particularly when they were paid in cash rather than stock because in stock you don’t get the benefit until somebody sells the stock. And but when they get it in cash, all of a sudden a deficit can turn into a surplus. So, I mean, I have somewhat of a warped view of this because it used to help me balance by big 30, 40 billion dollar budget.

Giuliani added that the big banks “should do a better job of explaining their compensation system and they should do a better job of explaining what they contribute, which is really the life blood that makes our economy work.” Watch it:

This isn’t the first time Giuliani has made this argument. About this time last year, he defended Wall Streets practices by saying that “one of the ways in which you determined New York City’s budget, tax revenues, was Wall Street bonuses.” He added that it has “a reverse effect on the economy, if you somehow take that bonus out of the economy. It really will create unemployment.”

As the Wonk Room’s Pat Garofalo has pointed out but Giuliani neglects to mention, “the banks are returning to huge paydays when their profits have come courtesy of the government programs that kept them from collapsing.” “Investment firms should be looking at ways to alter their pay packages to appropriately acknowledge how they were able to make so much money,” writes Garofalo.