By Duke Helfand
Los Angeles Times
February 4, 2010
California’s largest for-profit health insurer is moving to dramatically raise rates for customers with individual policies, setting off a furor among policyholders and prompting state insurance regulators to investigate.
Anthem Blue Cross is telling many of its approximately 800,000 customers who buy individual coverage — people not covered by group rates — that its prices will go up March 1 and may be adjusted “more frequently” than its typical yearly increases.
The insurer declined to say how high it is increasing rates. But brokers who sell these policies say they are fielding numerous calls from customers incensed over premium increases of 30% to 39%, saying they come on the heels of similar jumps last year.
Insurers are free to cherry-pick the healthiest customers in the lightly regulated individual market. They can raise rates at any time as long as they notify the state Department of Insurance and prove that they are spending at least 70% of premiums on medical care.
Many policyholders say the rate hikes are the largest they can remember, and they fear that subsequent premium growth will narrow their options — leaving them to buy policies with higher deductibles and less coverage or putting health insurance out of reach altogether.
The insurer said it had a team of workers to help customers balance costs and insurance.
“Anthem offers a variety of health benefit plans,” the company said, “and we are dedicated to working with our members to find health coverage plans that are the most appropriate and affordable for their needs.”
http://articles.latimes.com/2010/feb/04/business/la-fi-insure-anthem5-2010feb05
And…
Letter from Kathleen Sebelius, Secretary of Health and Human Services, to Leslie Margolin, President, Anthem Blue Cross
U.S. Department of Health & Human Services
February 8, 2010
Excerpt:
One of the biggest pressures facing families, businesses and governments at every level are skyrocketing health insurance costs. With so many families already affected by rising costs, I was very disturbed to learn through media accounts that Anthem Blue Cross plans to raise premiums for its California customers by as much as 39 percent. These extraordinary increases are up to 15 times faster than inflation and threaten to make health care unaffordable for hundreds of thousands of Californians, many of whom are already struggling to make ends meet in a difficult economy.
Your company’s strong financial position makes these rate increases even more difficult to understand. As you know, your parent company, WellPoint Incorporated, has seen its profits soar, earning $2.7 billion in the last quarter of 2009 alone.
http://www.hhs.gov/news/press/2010pres/02/20100208c.html
And…
‘A Wasted Opportunity’
By Joseph Rago
Wall Street Journal
February 7, 2010
Mrs. (Angela) Braly is the CEO and president of WellPoint, the largest U.S. commercial health insurer by membership. Her company’s affiliated health plans in 14 states cover 34 million people—or roughly one out of nine Americans. It contracts with 82% of the nation’s primary-care physicians, 84% of specialists, and 94% of hospitals. That scale lands her on the most-wanted list in President Obama’s Washington.
The tragedy, as she sees it, is what “a wasted opportunity” it all turned out to be. “Health-care reform” soon became “health-insurance reform” exclusively. “It was a pivot that was—unfortunate,” she says, “because it is not going to solve the longer-term problem.”
The solution is to “reintroduce the consumer to the health-care equation,” and on that front, she believes, insurers “are actually the part of the health-care delivery system that is there to create the value.” Mrs. Braly thinks patients will make more cost-conscious decisions if they have the incentives and the tools—namely, the information about cost and quality that is the basis of any ordinary market.
Mrs. Braly concedes that some people with pre-existing conditions can find it difficult to find affordable coverage, especially if they lose their job, get divorced, move, etc. “It’s when people have no option that we’re really in trouble and need to find a solution,” she says. But a better alternative to central insurance planning is public-private partnerships to create insurance pools for those with high risks. “That was a great idea that got pushed aside, and I think we need to revisit that concept.”
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704259304575043861057904360.html?mod=rss_opinion_main
Comment:
By Don McCanne, MD
WellPoint’s California subsidiary, Anthem Blue Cross, has provoked appropriate outrage in response to its announcement of premium increases as high as 39 percent. Why would they risk creating this potential public relations nightmare when Congress is considering major increases in regulatory oversight of their industry?
Keep in mind that Anthem Blue Cross has been very successful in keeping its individual insurance products competitive by selling only to the healthy by subjecting applicants to medical underwriting. With the unabated rise in health care costs, the upward pressure on premiums has been moderated by introducing numerous innovations, especially increased cost sharing.
Currently the most important tool they have to limit their exposure to health care costs is to switch their clients to plans with high deductibles (often $5000 or more) and high coinsurance (typically 40% of all allowed costs over the deductible). You can confirm these numbers at eHealthInsurance.com.
By jacking premiums up to intolerable levels for low deductible and low coinsurance plans, they force their clients to choose these high cost sharing plans. Once enrollment drops in the low cost sharing plans, high cost individuals remain, driving premiums up even further resulting in the death spiral. At that time they can withdraw the low deductible plans from the market and require that their clients choose either the high cost sharing plans or drop their coverage altogether.
Another factor that has driven premiums up now is the high unemployment rate that has caused many individuals to drop their coverage, especially those who are relatively healthy, leaving in the plans those who try to hang on because of their greater health care needs. Of course, that adds to the death spiral.
Angela Braly, president, chairman, and CEO of WellPoint, supports greater patient cost sharing to “reintroduce the consumer to the health-care equation.” Patients will buy less health care, no matter how beneficial, when they are using their own money. That also happens to work out well for WellPoint since they will spend less on health care.
Angela Brady also wants those who need health care to be covered by public high-risk pools, while the healthy are covered by her private plans. That too allows WellPoint to spend less on health care, while we taxpayers foot the larger bills.
It would seem that the outrageous premium increases by Anthem Blue Cross would cause the administration to rethink a strategy of reform based on private insurance plans. But no. Instead HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius responds with a tisk, tisk, as Congress and the administration continue to move forward with locking us into this perverse system.
We need to respond with more than a tisk, tisk. We need to show up by the millions on February 25 (President Obama’s televised bipartisan health session) and demand the enactment of an improved Medicare for all of us.