Excerpt: America's Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), the trade association for the nation's health insurers, is fighting a familiar battle. It is fighting the perception that health insurance companies focus more on their shareholders' bottom lines than the interest of their patients. To negate this notion, AHIP features a dollar bill with one tiny slice out of it (shown below) on their Web site, illustrating that their members only make 1 cent of every dollar spent on health care.... That may be the case, says Princeton economist Uwe Reinhardt, but 'whether it's fair or not depends on what it is you want to describe,' he says. 'All that statement says is, if you eliminated all our [insurance company] profits, national health spending in America would be 1 percent lower. It has meaning only in that context,' Reinhardt says. Insurers are measuring their profits against total health care spending. That's all the money you and I and employers and insurers and the government spend for doctors' visits, hospitalizations, drugs and other things.  MORE >>