By Reed Abelson
The New York Times
January 21, 2010
With the possible collapse of the Congressional health care effort, health insurers might seem to have reason to celebrate. The legislation threatened to remake much of their business, with the prospect of burdensome government regulation and less profit from selling coverage to individuals and small businesses.
But now, in the possible absence of forced change to their business, the insurers still face the daunting challenge of selling a product that is increasingly out of reach for more Americans as the cost of medical care — and thus premiums — continues to climb.
Moreover, the industry’s main business of selling coverage through employers has largely stalled, while the weak economy has speeded the loss of customers as people lose their jobs and their health insurance.
“People are still being crowded out of the market because they can’t afford it,” said Sheryl R. Skolnick, a health care analyst for Pali Capital in New York.
But without the aid of the government through some provisions of the legislation, some policy analysts say the insurers might be hard pressed to rein in the fees charged by hospitals and doctors.
“They’ve lost all the leverage reform would have given them,” said Len Nichols, a health care economist for the New America Foundation, a policy research organization that supports an overhaul.
And the insurers say they know they cannot fix many of the problems in the health care system without the support of the government.
For insurers, the largest risk may be that without a government-led overhaul, their industry faces an even bleaker future should medical costs and premiums continue to soar, perhaps eventually prompting draconian changes from the government.
By the time Congress dares to try again to overhaul health care, some analysts predict, the problems with the system might be so acute that Washington might regulate the insurers more heavily than has been considered for the current legislation — or flirt even more with the idea of the federal government becoming directly involved in providing insurance.
“It’s going to come back to the forefront again,” predicted Matthew Borsch, an analyst at Goldman Sachs who follows the industry and says the insurers face an increasingly daunting environment.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/22/health/policy/22insure.html?hp=&pagewanted=all
Comment:
By Don McCanne, MD
We have stated repeatedly that health care costs are now so high that private insurers are no longer capable of providing health plans with affordable premiums if those plans are to be effective in preventing financial hardship in the face of medical need. Private health plans are an obsolete method of financing health care.
The health care reform process began with the goals of covering everyone and controlling health care costs. That would have been a straightforward task had they agreed to establish a single payer national health program. Instead it was decided to build reform on the foundation of our existing private insurance industry that is approaching obsolescence.
Keep in mind what health care now costs for our healthiest sector – the healthy workforce and their young healthy families. The average costs for a family of four is now $16,771 (Milliman Medical Index). This does not include insurer administrative costs. Considering that median household income is $50,303 (2008), the premium that must be charged for a private plan with adequate benefits, plus the out-of-pocket expenses, are totally out of reach for the average family.
The private insurance industry has survived to this point primarily for two reasons. Most important is that they have been able to sell their products to the healthiest of us – group plans for the healthy workforce, and individual plans for those who pass underwriting requirements. Also the tradition of employer sponsorship of plans has provided a revenue source that has been tolerated by workers who forgo their wage increases.
But the cost of these plans have reached a threshold such that employees are no longer tolerating stagnation of their wages, and employers are no longer tolerating the costs of their combined employee wage and benefit packages. Insurance plan innovations designed to slow the premium increases to keep them competitive have shifted costs to employees who actually need health care. The backlash against these unanticipated costs is sure to accelerate.
The insurance industry had no choice but to turn to the government for solutions that would ensure its survival. As Congress patched the reform proposal together, it became immediately obvious that the private insurance model was not capable of covering everyone, so they gave up on the goal of universal coverage. As they continued to work on the problem of high costs, the limitations of the private insurance model left them with wish-they-would-work policy options that would have very little impact on cost containment.
With abandonment of the two primary goals for reform, Congress was left with the job of patching together policies that would keep the insurance industry in play, as if protecting the private insurers was the primary goal in the first place. To greatly expand their market, the insurers would have to accept patients who actually needed health care, ending disqualification for preexisting disorders. To prevent adverse selection, everyone would be mandated to purchase health plans.
That would provide the plans with the market that they need, but it left one more problem. To make premiums affordable, even with subsidies, health care costs would have to be controlled. The insurers insist that the government must control the costs, but that does not work in a model designed to leave the private insurers in charge of health care financing.
If no reform is enacted, the entire insurance industry goes into the death spiral of ever higher premiums. If the Senate version is enacted, the insurers would get a temporary reprieve through the government subsidies, but it would not be long before rising costs would again be unbearable for the payers. The golden age of America’s private health insurance industry is about to end, whether or not a bill passes.
The Massachusetts election has given us a brief window in which we can step back and ponder, “What on earth are we doing!?” We can do it right. We can dismiss the obsolete model of private insurance plans and enact an equitably-financed, improved Medicare that really would include all of us, and provide an effective mechanism for slowing health care spending.