Health Insurers Address Issue Of Nixed Policies
By Rhonda Rundle
The Wall Street Journal
February 27, 2008
The health-insurance industry is racing to defuse a growing furor over retroactive policy cancellations that have saddled some patients with big medical bills and sparked lawsuits.
America’s Health Insurance Plans, an industry group, is pushing a proposal with state regulators that would give consumers the right to appeal such policy cancellations, known as rescissions, to an external panel, whose decisions would be binding.
But some critics say that the practice of unfair policy rescissions suggests that private health insurers aren’t up to the task of ensuring that sick people maintain coverage.
“We are often viewed as having very different views from the insurance industry, but on this particular matter we think this is a step in the right direction,” said Ron Pollack, executive director of Families USA, a Washington nonprofit organization.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120408088594795743.html.html
Comment:
By Don McCanne, MD
Our goal is to bring everyone under the health care financing umbrella, including those with significant health care needs. The goal of the insurance industry is to bring the healthy under their umbrella, while excluding those with health care needs.
The insurers find that some do sneak in who need health care. When the underwriting process fails to exclude these individuals in the first place, they still want one more chance to throw them out. Because of the black eye they’ve received over their excessively aggressive, cruel cancellation activities, they now wish to establish a process by which they can receive an independent stamp of approval for these rescissions.
It is no surprise that the insurance industry’s response is merely to attempt to relieve themselves of the obligation to cover these individuals, when the real problem that needs to be addressed is to provide these individuals with health care.
Ron Pollack of Families USA has repeatedly rejected single payer as a model of reform, insisting that reform must be achieved in incremental steps instead. We’ve been following that incremental path for the last couple of decades, and all parameters are worse. He claims that the stamp-of-approval process is a step in the right direction, but granting private insurers authoritative approval to jerk insurance coverage from under those who need it sounds like another step backwards to me.