What, you might ask yourself, would cause a health insurance company coming off a quarter where it had multi-billion dollar profits to slam individual policyholders with rate increases up to 39%?

Well, let’s see. 

Maybe the insurer is headquartered on Mars and is unaware that a debate to reform the health care system has been raging in the United States for the past year.  And maybe this insurer was unaware that this debate has witnessed health insurers taking more than their share of abuse.

Or maybe the insurer is headquartered in the U.S. but is in need of a gigantic corporate hearing aid to assist in overcoming a massive condition of tone deafness.

Or maybe the insurer is just plain arrogant and doesn’t give a hoot about how this plays out in the larger world.

OK, maybe it’s none of these.  Maybe there were good reasons for the move and let’s concede them all.  So, concede the point that those billions in profit were largely a one-shot deal arising from a sale of a business.

And concede that the state’s regulations and the recession were causing the insurer to lose money on its individual business.  And concede that medical costs are skyrocketing, leaving premiums breathless to catch up in many cases.

Even with all those valid reasons, I still have to ask what the impulse is that causes one to offer up oneself as a piñata.  For surely, the company, no matter how tone deaf, had to have had some inkling of the uproar its pricing actions would cause.

After experiencing a year of hearing insurers railed at for unrestrained increases in premiums that are crushing businesses and consumers, how on earth do you go ahead and up the ante for some customers by 39%?

Was the company really clueless enough to expect that politicians would pass up the opportunity to relaunch a crusade that was showing signs of flagging?  Do lions pass up a nice big chunk of red meat when it’s thrown their way?

So, here’s my advice to the CEO of the company.  Don’t blame your actuaries, who I’m sure had very good reasons for justifying these increases.  Do blame your PR people—they’re paid to know better and they let you down grievously.   

And do take some of the blame yourself.  You could have had enough courage to tell your shareholders that this was just not the time to become a poster child for the excesses of the health insurance business.

I certainly hope the rest of the business will take note of what happened here.  But it does make you wonder whether tone deafness has become so persistent a condition that insurers have stopped listening.

By this time we all know how very very difficult it is to get anything done in the U.S. Senate, so it is not surprising that Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., was upset about President Obama’s proposals regarding banks—what businesses they can or cannot be in under certain conditions and how big they should be.

One can understand the annoyance of the soon to be retired senior senator from the Nutmeg state who is chairman of the Senate Banking Committee.  After all, members of his committee have been paired off for months working on different facets of financial reform so that the Senate can have a bipartisan solution to hold up to the world.

Never mind that by the time Dodd’s committee finally puts something out, whatever the plan is will have taken longer to gestate than an elephant.  And the similarity, friends, is not likely to end there. 

So much time will have gone by that we will almost have forgotten what the impetus for financial reform was—and maybe that’s the point.  After all, banks are minting money again (although still not lending it), bank bonuses are in the pre-meltdown range (if not higher) and money from bank lobbyists is gushing. 

It’s obviously ‘What, me worry?’ time again in the good old U.S.A.

So what does the president do when these months-long negotiations between Banking Committee members are reaching a critical point?  He comes along and crashes the party.

I guess he didn’t realize just how delicate these negotiations are, how their fragility could be shattered by wanting too much from the legislation.

The New York Times quoted Dodd as saying that the administration was “’getting precariously close’ to excessive ambition for the legislation.” 

Dodd added: “I don’t want to be in a position where we end up doing nothing because we tried to do too much.”

While I feel your pain, senator, I’m also thinking that maybe the president has seen how unrewarding it has been to pretty much hand over major initiatives on health care reform and financial services reform to Congress.  Maybe he has seen the error of his ways and decided to start flexing a bit of executive power.

Maybe he just wants to get something done.  And let’s face it, that hasn’t seemed to bother you or your fellow committee members very much.

Funny how one election has thrown everything up in the air.

Of course I’m talking about the election of Scott Brown as the Republican senator from the bluest of states, Massachusetts, on January 19. The result has been that Democrats of all stripes are running scared, while Republicans can’t stop crowing about the renewed vigor that Brown’s victory has brought to their party.

I happened to be in Massachusetts the weekend before the election and believe me there was hardly any time for music on any station because the competing ads for Scott and his opponent, Martha Coakley, were going nonstop like some insanely repetitive, yet inescapable, loop.

Brown, as it happens, did not run as a Republican; indeed, he seemed at pains to mention his party affiliation at all.  No, he was an independent. 

One of Coakley’s ads, in fact, identified him as Republican Scott Brown as if this in and of itself was enough in the Bay State to ensure a politician’s defeat.  Sorry, Martha.

But think about it, have you heard much, if anything, about health care reform in the wake of Brown’s victory?  Compared to the nonstop barrage of news that kept coming out of Washington for close to a year, the silence on the issue after the Massachusetts verdict is not a little startling.

Of course, there’s probably a ton of stuff going on in the back rooms of the House and Senate and White House, but any clear sense of direction is not to be found.   Not even in the president’s State of the Union message.

If, as a result of this upset election, nothing or very little comes of nearly a whole year of trying to reform the health care system, there’s no doubt the president will take a body blow.  Even though he did a terrible job of leading the fight on the issue and never truly made it clear what exactly he wanted in the final bill, it is nonetheless the issue that has defined his first year in office.  And if it comes to nothing, what was all the sound and fury about?  And further, what about all the other pressing issues that were back-burnered so that health care reform could take precedence? 

Many people will be only too happy to see the end of any kind of health reform effort, but the fact remains that the system is not going to heal itself and the major problems that were there a year ago are still with us, only worse.

The silence that I referred to above has not only descended on Washington.  There’s been hardly any comment from the health insurance industry, the pharmaceutical business or health care providers.

The first two, in particular, had a lot to gain from reform because they were looking forward to millions of new customers paying premiums and buying prescription drugs.  That promised revenue went a long way toward easing the pain of some of the restrictions that the reform plans intended to put in place.

If some kind of “reform” is salvaged after all, it’s likely to be aimed at making changes that affect health insurance regulation.  Insurers could very well end up being subject to many of the restrictions that were in the grand schemes, but without the palliative effect of those millions of new customers.

Trying to forestall this result might be worth insurers bringing some verbal life support to health care reform now.  In fact, reiterating support of reform could well capture the imagination of the public and politicians to good effect.

Without making some noise now, is anybody going to care what they have to peep about later on?