Covering New Ground in Health System Shift
Submitted by seachange on Tue, 2010-08-10 04:43.
Robert Pear, New York Times, August 2, 2010 Washington - In late March, after passage of the landmark health care legislation, the Obama administration sent a sternly worded notice to insurance companies, saying they must cover children, regardless of any pre-existing conditions. Insurers acceded to the demand, and the White House declared victory. But it came at a price. Four months later some insurers said they would stop writing new coverage for children in the individual insurance market. If parents could buy “child only” policies at any time for any reason, they might wait until their children got sick, insurers said. The White House backpedaled last week ... Covering
Bottom Feeders
" ... bottom-feeder insurance plans, which have built a business around selling policies to healthy young people (and which) often provide inadequate coverage when people get sick ..." That quotation describes the products being sold in the individual insurance market by WellPoint, the largest insurer in the nation. Imagine WellPoint improving those plans so that they do provide adequate benefits, with a choice of physicians and hospitals, without excessive cost sharing, and that they would include everyone regardless of preexisting conditions. Imagine the premiums that they would have to charge. Then imagine many companies developing similar quality insurance products to create a robust market of plan choices within the insurance exchanges. Keep imagining because these products will have to exist only in our minds since the private insurance industry will never again be able to make them a reality if they are going to cover everyone with premiums we can afford. For those who have employer-sponsored plans that seem to be working, keep in mind that these plans have cherry picked the large but highly select group of the inexpensive healthy workforce and their young healthy families. Also keep in mind that the employee cost of these plans is not only the payroll deduction, but also the forgone wage increases that pay for the employer contribution, and now to be added are the taxes that will be paid to support the subsidies for those who purchase their plans through the exchanges. Nobody is getting off cheap. If the Obama administration is going to "regulate the industry for the benefit of consumers," then they can't help but "destabilize or disrupt the existing market in a way that makes insurance less available or more expensive to consumers." Why should we worry about a destabilized market of private plans, when our real concern is how are we going to pay for the health care that any of us might need? The obvious solution would be to replace the private plans with a single payer national health program - an improved Medicare for all. The fate of the private insurers should be the least of our concerns. - Don McCanne, MD, Physicians for a National Health Program