Andy Cobb has had enough. A former pitchman for BlueCross Blue Shield of Florida, Cobb is breaking with the firm and speaking out in favor of health care reform and a public health insurance option.
"This is the time when Americans have to choose which side we're on," Cobb told HuffPost, quoting Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio). "Is it the insurance companies or the American people?"
Cobb calls on what he dubs his fellow "spokes-jerks" -- singling out the FreeCreditReport.com guy -- to stop hawking products that hurt the American people.
Cobb teamed with Brave New Films to create the short video.
"I do know that 19 percent of every dollar of our premiums goes to administrative costs, for executive compensation and people like me. We can't afford people like me any more in this country," he said.
Netting $2.5 billion in profits last year wasn't enough for WellPoint, the nation's largest insurance company. Now, WellPoint's affiliate, Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield, is suing the state of Maine for refusing to guarantee it a profit margin in the midst of a painful recession.
Blue Cross. Blue Shield. That's WellPoint -- the largest insurer in America. They're suing an entire state for putting people over profits, and people need to know.
Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Rhode Island won’t withdraw its proposed double-digit rate hikes, as requested by state Health Insurance Commissioner Christopher F. Koller, which means the request will now be aired at a formal rate hearing.
The nonprofit insurer notified Koller on Thursday that it is still seeking to raise its rates — an average of 13.9 percent for small employers and 16.3 percent for large employers — beginning Oct. 1.
Koller also rebuffed rate hikes sought by UnitedHealthCare of New England and Tufts Health Plan and asked the companies to withdraw their requests. Neither has stated its intentions, said John A. Cogan, legal counsel for Koller’s office. One of the insurers did ask for an extension of Friday’s deadline to respond. As a result, said Cogan, the deadline was extended to Thursday.
Executives of three of the nation's largest health insurers told federal lawmakers in Washington on Tuesday that they would continue canceling medical coverage for some sick policyholders, despite withering criticism from Republican and Democratic members of Congress who decried the practice as unfair and abusive.
The hearing on the controversial action known as rescission, which has left thousands of Americans burdened with costly medical bills despite paying insurance premiums, began a day after President Obama outlined his proposals for revamping the nation's healthcare system.
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Blue Cross of California encouraged employees through performance evaluations to cancel the health insurance policies of individuals with expensive illnesses, Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.) charged at the start of a congressional hearing today on the controversial practice known as rescission.
But documents obtained by the House Committee on Energy and Commerce and released today show that the company's employee performance evaluation program did include a review of rescission activity.
The documents show, for instance, that one Blue Cross employee earned a perfect score of "5" for "exceptional performance" on an evaluation that noted the employee's role in dropping thousands of policyholders and avoiding nearly $10 million worth of medical care.
WellPoint's Blue Cross of California subsidiary and two other insurers saved more than $300 million in medical claims by canceling more than 20,000 sick policyholders over a five-year period, the House committee said.
The committee investigation uncovered several rescission practices that one lawmaker called egregious, including targeting every policyholder diagnosed with leukemia, breast cancer and 1,400 other serious illnesses. Such investigations involve scouring the policyholder's original application and years' worth of medical and pharmacy records in search of any discrepancies.
"These practices reveal that when an insurance company receives a claim for an expensive, life-saving treatment, some of them will look for a way -- any way -- to avoid having to pay for it," said Stupak, chairman of the commerce committee's Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations.
As the country contemplates a major reform and restructuring of the way we run our national health care system (if it can even be called that), it needs to be pointed out that the mammoth health insurance industry is nothing but a parasite on that system.
Health insurance companies add zero value to the delivery of health care. Indeed, they are a significant cost factor that sucks up, according to some estimates such as one by the organization Physicians for a National Health Program, as much as 31 percent of every dollar spent on medical services (a percentage that has been rising steadily year after year).
Insurance companies are damaging in more ways than simply cost, though.
They also actively interfere in the delivery of quality medical care, as anyone who has had to battle with some "nurse" on the phone at an insurance company to get required pre-authorization for needed procedure can attest. Just recently, the editor of a local weekly alternative paper in Philadelphia, Brian Hinkey, the victim of a near fatal hit-and-run accident last year who spent several days in a coma, and has been working hard to regain the use of all his limbs and faculties, reported in an opinion piece in the Philadelphia Inquirer on how his insurer after a few successful weeks of in-hospital rehab, denied him coverage for six critical weeks for out-patient rehab services, though every specialist on head injuries knows that early, consistent therapy is crucial to recovery of lost brain function.
This kind of human abuse is standard operating procedure for companies whose bottom lines are fattened the more services they can deny to insured clients. My own father, once doomed by a metastasized cancer following prostate surgery, was saved by a procedure offered by a physician in Atlanta that his Blue Cross plan in Connecticut refused to pay for. He had to finance the expensive treatment himself.
Now these medical system parasites are suddenly running scared, because it is clear that if everyone in America is to be guaranteed health insurance coverage--a promised goal of the new administration of President Barack Obama, and, according to polls, the desire of a large majority of the American people--they are going to stand exposed as a costly impediment to achieving that goal.
Insurance companies have managed to stay profitable and at least somewhat affordable to the private employers and workers who, together, have to pay for them, by denying care not just to policy holders, who are denied certain tests and treatments but especially to those who have known ailments, who are simply denied coverage altogether.
For decades, people with "pre-existing conditions" have been either barred from coverage, or have had to sign waivers that excluded them from getting coverage for treatment of those pre-existing conditions. In the worst case, which is all too common, people have ended up dying because they couldn't get treatment for common and easily treated ailments like high blood pressure or diabetes.
Now we hear that two big insurance trade groups, the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association and America's Health Insurance Plans, have offered to "phase out the practice of varying premiums based on health status in the individual market" in the event that all Americans are required to obtain health insurance.
Well sure they're doing that. If they didn't, the government would force them to! The insurance industry, in saying that it would not price sick people out of coverage in a nationally-mandated health insurance scheme, is merely recognizing the political firestorm that would arise if it were not to do that, and were to force the sick and inform onto some government insurance plan, subsidized by taxpayers, while they just cherry-picked the healthy population, as they've been doing now for decades.
The whole point is that if everyone is included in the insurance pool, instead of only the healthy population, then the overall cost of being chronically or critically ill to the individual is spread over the whole of society. Premiums get adjusted accordingly.
Medicare is the model. Here we already have a government plan that covers every single elderly and disabled person.
If we were to simply extend Medicare to cover everyone in America, we would essentially have the Canadian model of health care (which, it should be pointed out, costs half what we pay in America for health care when private insurance and government programs are added together). As with current Medicare, the government would pay for treatment, with private doctors and hospitals providing the care, and with the government negotiating the permissible charges. That, in a nutshell, is what "single-payer" means--the government is the single payer for all health care. It doesn't mean, as the right-wing critics claim in their scaremongering propaganda, that people would be forced to use certain doctors and certain hospitals. Far from it. That's what private HMOs do.
Medicare is efficient (only 3.6% of Medicare's budget goes to administrative costs, compared to 31% for health care delivered through private insurance plans), its clients like it, and doctors and hospitals accept it.
We should not be tricked by this seeming sudden appearance of decency on the part of these corporate parasites. There is simply no valid reason for preserving the private insurance industry's role in any health care reform plan that is aimed at giving everyone access to health care in America. The Obama administration needs to jettison its "free market" fetish when it comes to health care. The financing of health care for all Americans can all be handled much better by the government. Medicare has proven this. Other countries--Britain, Australia, France, Canada, Taiwan and most other modern nations have proven this.
Leave the insurance industry to handle our car insurance and our life insurance. It has no more place in the delivery of health care than do tapeworms in the digestive process of our bowels.
Three years ago the Commonwealth of Massachusetts enacted a far-reaching health reform law that politicians and the media hailed as a model for other states and the federal government. Indeed that law has become the major blueprint for health system change on a national scale, and its advocates are aggressively marketing some variation of the Massachusetts plan as the reform of choice. Until recently, there has been little analysis of how the law has worked. Today we begin a series of posts that will explore the Massachusetts law with an eye toward helping the press and the public understand the flashpoints as legislation based on the Bay State’s experiment winds its way through Congress.
Until recently, few have criticized the program. One health care provider who asked for anonymity told me: “Nobody wants to be quoted as going against Senator Kennedy. Nobody wants to be the one who says the emperor has no clothes. If you or your organization speaks out, you get cut off politically.”
