With health care negotiations stalled in Washington, the Obama administration is seizing on the seething fury felt by nearly 700,000 Anthem Blue Cross customers in California who have received notices of increases that average 25 percent. About a quarter of them are seeing leaps of 35 percent to 39 percent, the company said, at least four times the rate of medical inflation. President Barack Obama warned that the spike in Anthem's premiums was 'just a preview of coming attractions' if the country failed to overhaul its health insurance system. The confrontation has also reinforced an emerging shift of focus in Washington from the need for universal coverage to the need for serious cost control. And it brought into clear relief the deep rift between the administration and the insurance industry concerning a central question: whether such unsustainable pricing is driven by the bloodless economics of risk or corporate greed. Sacramento and Washington chastised Anthem relentlessly last week, and hearings are scheduled in both capitals. On Saturday, Anthem's parent company, WellPoint Inc. of Indianapolis, agreed to a request from California's insurance commissioner to delay the increases by two months, to May 1, so he could determine whether they comply with loss-ratio regulations. Anthem and WellPoint cite what the industry calls a recessionary death spiral: As unemployment and declining wages prompt healthy people to drop their insurance, the remaining risk pool becomes sicker and more expensive to insure, which in turn forces up prices and pushes more people out of the market. A study released this week found that the five largest health insurance companies collectively lost 2.7 million customers last year, including 1.4 million by WellPoint. Yet they reported record profits of $12.2 billion. But in California, where Los Angeles-based Anthem controls more than half of the individual market, regulators have little power to prevent insurers from raising individual rates as high as the market will bear. That often forces consumers to move to less-generous policies with higher deductibles to hold down their costs. California's insurance commissioner, Steve Poizner, who is running for governor in the Republican primary, has hired actuaries to study whether Anthem is spending at least 70 percent of premium revenues on claims, as required by state regulations. WellPoint officials said they were confident that Anthem exceeded the threshold. 