Archive for March, 2010
HEALTH REFORM’S “IMMEDIATE BENEFITS”
About the same time I saw a picture of the man I voted for signing the new health reform bill, I received an email with a picture of George Bush (The Younger) waving at the camera with one of his goofier grins and the caption, “Miss me yet?” I’m hardly a Bush fan, but at the moment—God help me—I’m even missing Nixon.
One of the annoyances from having spent forty years inside the health care beast is having to endure the blatant half-truths and patent falsehoods coming from our President and his legions of economics-challenged health reform advisors and supporters. Particularly abrading are his statements about the “immediate benefits” of the new law, with no mention of the equally immediate costs that will accompany them.
Here are some of the more bothersome ones:
- Free preventive care. The journal Health Affairs and others have authoritatively concluded that preventive services almost always increase medical costs rather than reduce them. Thus, our premiums will go even higher with no net savings now or ever.
IS EMPLOYER HEALTH INSURANCE DYING?
One of President Obama’s most frequent health reform mantras is, “If you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan.” This is consistent with his belief that we “must build on the current employer-based system” that insures 158 million people who comprise the vast bulk of all privately insured Americans. There is just one problem with this approach: employer-provided group insurance is dying and cannot be saved. Despite its longstanding dominance, group insurance, whether self-funded or provided by outside insurers, suffers from major flaws that are increasingly exposing its fundamental unsuitability as an even partial solution for effective health care reform. This is true for all employers, no matter what size. Here are group insurance’s more pronounced shortcomings:
1. Lack of Portability: Group insurance ties the individual to his or her job, an anachronism in an era when people change their jobs as often as their cars. And if you lose your job through layoffs or illness, you soon lose your insurance as well. If you can’t find affordable individual coverage, then welcome to the ranks of the uninsured.
IS THE HEALTH INSURANCE INDUSTRY DYING?
As part of his last-ditch effort to revive the Senate’s undead health reform bill, President Obama has proposed a federal board to veto health insurance premiums it finds “unreasonable and unjustified.” In case you’re wondering, all 50 states already do this, albeit with the countervailing requirement that premiums must also be “adequate” to assure insurance carrier solvency—a key requirement the President ignores.
His proposal is the obvious result of his Administration’s high dudgeon over Wellpoint’s 39% individual premium hikes in California (where it has lost millions). The argument is that such increases are unconscionable from an industry that earned “$12 billion in profits last year.” Please note the inapt comparison of percentages with dollars, a diversionary, demagogic tactic often used to enrage the innumerate while failing to note Wellpoint’s 2009 operating profit margin of 4.8% or the entire industry’s hopelessly pedestrian 2.2%. Even more absurd was one congresswoman’s snarky suggestion that the real reason for the increases was to maintain WellPoint CEO Angela Braly’s $9 million annual compensation—equal to twenty-eight cents per member per year. The cause of premium increases is not profits or executive compensation. To paraphrase President Clinton, “It’s rising medical costs, stupid!”
