More Strong Support For Real Health Care Reform

October 10, 2009

Earlier this week Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield of Maine, a subsidiary of WellPoint, made a not-so-flattering headline. I even wrote a post on the matter. In a nutshell, the insurers are suing the state of Maine to raise rates by 18.5% after the state commissioners turned them down, but offered a 10.5% rate increase instead. Today a report came out that Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Dakota has made some equally dumb moves. These two episodes only further expose the need for major reforms in the health care industry.

The story with the insurer in North Dakota is the millions of dollars they are spending on their own. Much like the bankers did last year immediately after they received billions in taxpayer assistance. In the insurers’ case, they paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to send employees on a retreat to the Caribbean, which, according to this article, was “compounded by $15 million in executive bonuses over five years, $400,000 for charter flights and $35,000 for a vice president’s retirement party”. Making this much worse is the fact that Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Dakota is a co-op, meaning it’s a non-profit corporation. So if they are non-profit, that means they are charging policyholders considerably more than they should so huge ungodly bonuses can be paid to the executives, plus send them and many others on lavish vacations. Sooooo — so much for the co-op option talked about in Washington and elsewhere; it doesn’t matter — the company is still going to rip off policyholders.

The Washington Post article also points out several other excess luxuries afforded Blue Cross Blue Shield employees in other states.

An article by Amy Goldstein illustrates the ultimate arrogance with all insurers. She cites cases where patients who were in the hospital were sent a letter by special courier that told the patients if they didn’t leave the hospital immediately they, the patient, would be stuck with paying the bill. Security guards at Bayonne Medical Center stopped 14 couriers from reaching patient’s rooms. But that didn’t stop the insurers; they begin sending faxes and letters to patients’ doctors and their homes. When she learned of the news, one patient started packing her bags to leave the hospital even though she had an antibiotic IV dripping into her body to combat a severe lung infection.

Over the past two months or so hundreds of articles have been written quoting the health industry’s concerns about reform. Almost all are trying to play on the publics’ sympathy. One of the latest is that the Democrats’ bill would leave too many uncovered. The industry knows that one single attempt to thwart the public option will not get the job done. So they spend tens of millions of dollars coming up with ‘different ways the public will get screwed by health care reform’ in hopes that a combined total of those different ways will be enough to defeat any real reform. Adding insult to injury to all this is another factual statement made by the author of this article: “White House officials, mindful of a possible industry uprising….”. “Mindful of a possible industry uprising”?! Who the hell cares? If they are not bitching and complaining, then we know something is wrong with what’s being proposed. Unfortunately the author is right — we all know who White House officials and most in Congress are really concerned for. This reflects the power of the well-paid lobbyist and campaign donations, which the commoners do not have and can not afford.

As E.J. Dionne, Jr. pointed out in this article earlier this month, “the debate over the public option has rarely concentrated on the substance of the idea. Instead, it has been almost entirely ideological. Because opponents know from polling that the public wants the chance to choose a government plan, they move the discourse to abstract and often demagogic ground”.

If the industry is able to defeat only one single thing of all the proposals being pushed by the Democrats, it would be the public option. Not only would a public option go a long way in stopping the sorts of border-level crimes such as those pointed out above but would also keep most every other thing they do wrong now in check. Even if health insurance companies find they have no choice except to step down a notch or two from their luxurious life styles due to a public option, they are not going away — there’s still a fortune to be made.

Although I don’t necessarily agree with all his suggestions, Martin Feldstein says in A Better Way to Health Reform “the American health-care system suffers from three serious problems: Health-care costs are rising much faster than our incomes. More than 15 percent of the population has neither private nor public insurance. And the high cost of health care can lead to personal bankruptcy, even for families that do have health insurance”. Unfortunately for the public, opponents of real reform admit this but offer no serious ways of fixing it. Why? Because doing so would reduce the high-flying life styles of the industry from the mesosphere down to the stratosphere. And for them, that’s not acceptable.