Posts Tagged ‘health insurance companies’

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As many predicted, health insurance costs skyrocketing, insured Americans forgoing care

September 28th, 2011

by nyceve

As the debate played out during the contentious summer of 2009 before the passage of the Affordable Care Act, many were deeply concerned that the insurance industry would escalate its war against the American people. We feared and predicted even more egregious price gouging.

It seems all our fears were justified.

As we know, even insured Americans are delaying or forgoing needed and necessary healthcare because the high deductible junk insurance they have (which is all they can afford), requires huge out-of-pocket costs, making healthcare a luxury. And please keep in mind, we’re talking about people with insurance. Insured Americans are consuming less health not because they don’t need to see a doctor, but because they can’t afford to do so. This is what the insurers want, they collect our premiums, sell us high deductible insurance which we can’t even afford to use.

A new study just released by the Kaiser Family Foundation paints as grim a picture of the U.S. healthcare system and its unaffordability, as I have ever read. It is ghastly and our healthcare system is on the precipice of collapse.

After several years of relatively modest premium increases, annual premiums for employer-sponsored family health coverage increased to $15,073 this year, up 9 percent from last year, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation/Health Research & Educational Trust 2011 Employer Health Benefits Survey released today.  On average, workers pay $4,129 and employers pay $10,944 toward those annual premiums.
Premiums increased significantly faster than workers’ wages (2.1 percent) and general inflation (3.2 percent).  Since 2001, family premiums have increased 113 percent, compared with 34 percent for workers’ wages and 27 percent for inflation.

“This year’s nine percent increase in premiums is especially painful for workers and employers struggling through a weak recovery,” Kaiser President and CEO Drew Altman, Ph.D. said.

You should not be surprised at this terrible and deeply demoralizing state of affairs. There is little (or nothing) in the Affordable Care Act which requires insurers to make their junk products affordable. Even worse, despite paying a huge percentage of our dwindling income to buy insurance, Americans are paying for almost useless policies. I define a useless policy as one with high deductibles and high out-of-pocket costs.  As the economy continues to show little or no improvement, even workers with insurance are not getting the care they need to do all the costs they are expected to shoulder.

And to make a bad situation even more troubling, the added benefits, insurers are now required to provide due to the passage of the Affordable Care Act, are giving them the cover to raise rates to unconscionable levels and ‘blame’ the ACA.

Throughout this year, major health insurers have defended higher premiums — and higher profits — saying that their expenses would rise once the economy recovered and people believed they could again afford medical care. The struggling economy will probably keep suppressing demand for medical care, particularly as people pay a larger share of their own medical bills through higher deductibles and co-payments, according to benefits consultants and others. About three-quarters of workers now pay part of the bill when they go see a doctor, and nearly a third have a deductible of at least $1,000 if they have single coverage, up from just one in 10 in 2006, according Kaiser.

The Affordable Care Act was written without teeth or strong enforcement mechanisms, but that is old, sad news.  To be fair, the ACA allocates money to the states to police rate hikes, but it is powerless to stop them, and many believe this is really window dressing to give cover to the politicians and to make the very gullible American people think the government is trying to bring us some relief.

Every  day in America, 3,700 families file for bankruptcy caused by illness and medical bills, and that number is rising. This shameful situation happens in no other wealthy democracy. It would be a scandal anywhere else. Most medically bankrupt families were middle-class before they suffered financial setbacks. Roughly 60 percent of them had attended college; 20 percent of families included a military veteran or active-duty soldier.

Most astoundingly, 60 percent of the individuals whose illness led to bankruptcy had private, for-profit health insurance when they got sick. Don’t we buy health insurance to avoid financial ruin? High deductibles lead directly to bankruptcy and foreclosure. To make matters worse, they cause people to postpone needed care. All of which lead to higher insurance company profits.

You should be very, very scared to be an American citizen. I’m sorry to say this, it’s the truth.

Nyceve is a board member for California OneCare. Originally posted in the DailyKos.

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Health Committee Chair’s Questionable Financial Gains From Insurance Industry Lobbyists

September 9th, 2011

When California Senate Health Committee Chair Ed Hernandez’s foot dragging earlier this year nearly killed the single payer bill, SB 810, outright, I wondered whether health insurance industry lobbyists had gotten to him. Hernandez, a Democrat, eventually voted to move SB 810 out of committee, but only after a massive amount of arm-twisting by universal healthcare advocates and a public dressing down by a Democratic Party activist at the state convention. However, weeks after the vote, SB 810 was still placed on ice, to be re-introduced in January.

Hernandez then complained about another popular bill, AB 52, that would have allowed state regulators to pre-approve insurance industry rate increases. He voted that one out of committee too, but said he wouldn’t support a final version unless changes were made. Under industry pressure, AB 52 soon died in the State Senate in late August. Well, turns out there may have been a reason for all of Hernandez’s hemming and hawing. According to an investigation by Think Progress, he’s been on the health lobbyists’ payroll:

State Sen. Ed Hernandez (D), the chair of the health committee, voted for AB 52 but told the press he could not support the bill in its current form. Hernandez’s income is boosted by about $69,000 a year in payments from Kaiser Health Plans, the state’s largest insurer (and one of AB 52′s most prominent opponents) in rent at an office building owned by Hernandez. The unusual arrangement might present a serious conflict of interest, but Hernandez’s spokesman told ThinkProgress that the rent payments began shortly before Hernandez entered the legislature, and that Kaiser maintains a community outreach center in the senator’s building. (emphasis is the author’s)

Hernandez’s spokesman can try to spin this stinky arrangement until he gets dizzy. It doesn’t matter that the rent payments were made before Hernandez became a state senator. What’s problematic is that Hernandez continued this financial relationship with Kaiser while still sitting on the state Senate Health Committee. At the very least, Hernandez should have recused himself from the vote on AB 52. It makes one wonder if there are any other little arrangements the senator has got going with his health lobbyist buddies? The stench of corruption here is just too great to ignore.  It’s no wonder that we, the people of California, and the United States can’t get the kind of legislation passed that will truly address the dire problems we face, which includes replacing a morally bankrupt and deadly healthcare system with one that provides high-quality and affordable care to all. Our democracy has been hijacked by unethical business interests funneling money to our so-called “representatives” by means that may be legal in this country, but elsewhere, such “arrangements” would be called by another name.

Sylvia@californiaonecare.org

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John Nichols on replacing the mandate with Medicare for All

September 7th, 2011

Can We Have Health Reform Without an Individual Mandate? Yes, It’s Called ‘Medicare for All’

By John Nichols
The Nation, August 13, 2011

The individual mandate was always a bad idea. Instead of recognizing that healthcare is a right, the members of Congress and the Obama administration who cobbled together the healthcare reform plan created a mandate that maintains the abuses and the expenses of for-profit insurance companies — and actually rewards those insurance companies with a guarantee of federal money.

Those who think that the for-profit (or even not-for-profit) insurance industry has to control any healthcare reform initiative have every right to be upset with the 11th Circuit’s ruling — which almost certainly will send the case of the Obama healthcare plan to the US Supreme Court.
But those of us who have no desire to perpetuate the insurance industry can and should recognize that the proper — and entirely constitutional — reform is an expansion of Medicare to cover all Americans.

While Medicare is exceptionally popular, polling shows that the individual mandate is not — according to recent surveys, roughly 60 percent of Americans oppose it.

It also passes constitutional muster.

As former Labor Secretary Robert Reich notes: “[No] federal judge has struck down Social Security or Medicare as being an unconstitutional requirement that Americans buy something. Social Security and Medicare aren’t broccoli or asparagus. They’re as American as hot dogs and apple pie.”

“So if the individual mandate to buy private health insurance gets struck down by the Supreme Court or killed off by Congress,” says Reich, “I’d recommend President Obama immediately propose what he should have proposed in the beginning — universal health care based on Medicare for all, financed by payroll taxes.”

The insurance companies would, of course, scream.

But let them complain.

Americans don’t need mandates. They need healthcare.

And they have every right to ask, as activists with Physicians for a National Health Program have, that Medicare be expanded to cover all Americans — affordably, efficiently, capably and constitutionally.

http://www.thenation.com/blog/162765/can-we-have-health-reform-without-individual-mandate-yes-its-called-medicare-all

Comment:

By Don McCanne, MD

Americans overwhelmingly support Medicare, yet an unequivocal majority oppose a government requirement to purchase private health insurance. Why should we have to wait until we’re 65 to have Medicare, while in the interim being required to buy something we don’t want? Let the Supreme Court rule that the individual mandate is unconstitutional, and then maybe we can convince a newly elected Congress to pass the reform that we really need.

We are pleased that Washington correspondent John Nichols of The Nation has joined with Physicians for a National Health Program and the growing chorus of other enlightened voices who call for a vastly superior model of reform that actually would pass constitutional muster – an improved Medicare, expanded to include everyone.

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Pippa Abston, MD: Happy Birthday, Dear Medicare!

August 5th, 2011

Happy Birthday, Medicare!  I should send you one of those gag cards that teases you about getting older—but at 46, you’re a year younger than I am, so I won’t go there.  On your special day, a little reminiscing about your life…

You sure did have a hard time in the womb.  Many times, your enemies—the ones we always have with us, those who believe man is an island entire of himself—tried to abort you.  Even the doctors in the AMA worked like the dickens to get rid of you.  They didn’t kill you, thank goodness, but they did succeed in maiming you.  You were conceived as a public insurance for us all, but by the time you were born you had lost the limbs to care for those under age 65.  And you were hobbled so that you could only cover limited services, leaving deductibles and co-pays.

Even with your birth injuries, you’ve managed to do a lot of good in your 46 years.  I’m grateful for the service you’ve given to my grandparents, my father, and my in-laws.  Without your help, my husband and I would have been bankrupt long ago trying to help pay for their medical care.  Folks who worry about being in the “sandwich generation” now probably don’t realize how bad it would be with medical bills piled on top of that sandwich.  Our finances would be panini, or maybe toast.

Your enemies have tried to poison you over the years.  They force you to donate blood to something they call “Medicare Advantage”, private corporations who divert your precious transfusions toward their own profit instead of caring for patients. These same enemies put a gag over your mouth so you couldn’t negotiate with drug companies for fair prices.  Even today, some are working to drain all your blood and give it to private corporate vampires.

These actions have weakened you, but there’s a way to restore you to health.  We’ve got the technology to reattach the limbs you lost at birth, so you can become what you were always meant to be—Medicare for All.  Not only that, but we can improve you—make you cheaper and stronger—by removing your burdensome co-pays and deductibles.

Some worry you’d be slower with all your limbs. We can plan ahead to solve that problem by training more doctors and other health workers.  Once we remove all those bloodsucking insurance companies from you and the rest of us, you can get your strength back.  Our healthcare system as a whole has had to operate on 2/3 power for decades, while private insurers and the associated administrative costs have siphoned off a third of our medical funds.  Imagine what we can do when fully powered!

Happy Birthday, Medicare!  I’ll quit talking about your enemies—after all, this is a day to celebrate.  You also have friends.  Friends who love you are working tirelessly to help you fulfill your dreams.  Physicians for a National Health Program, Healthcare-Now!, and many other organizations, including labor unions and churches, continue to gain new members working for your cause.  There’s great hope in the next generation of doctors—the largest medical student group, the American Medical Student Association, officially endorses Medicare for All.  Even smart conservatives support you, because you are the most financially responsible way to address our health insurance needs.

So today, it’s all about you!  We’re having parties and singing your song, all over the country.  Happy Birthday, Dear Medicare.  May you have many, many more.

Re-posted with permission from Pippa Abston’s blog.

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