By The Associated Press
UnionLeader.com
June 7, 2007
The (New Hampshire) House voted yesterday to extend health insurance coverage to people who lose their insurance when their marriages break up.
The bill would require insurance companies to let divorced spouses remain on the ex-spouse’s policies for up to three years or until one spouse remarries.
Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield and the Association of American Health Insurance Plans (AHIP) opposed the bill.
Comment:
By Don McCanne, MD
Everyone should have health insurance coverage, automatically and permanently. It is wrong to require a link to extraneous qualifiers such as employment, location of residence, membership in organizations, age, or, in this instance, continuation of marriage to an individual with employer-sponsored coverage. Requiring such links satisfies the business model of the private insurers, but does so at the cost of leaving many without coverage. This remains one of the most serious flaws in our expensive, fragmented, and highly inequitable method of financing health care.
With the private insurance industry in charge, you would think that they would want to try to rectify the injustices in our system, especially when there is an increasing demand for reform. But, no. AHIP, the national trade association for the private insurance industry, and Anthem Blue Cross/Blue Shield opposed even this minuscule effort to temporarily reduce loss of coverage after divorce.
Our goal is to enable everyone to access the health care that they need without suffering financial hardship. In spite of their rhetoric, by their actions the private insurance industry has demonstrated repeatedly that they are not interested in helping us achieve this goal. They reject all reform proposals that don’t match their business model.
Well let’s present them with the reform proposal that we really do need: single-payer national health insurance. They’ll certainly reject that, but so what? We’ll be far better off without them.