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HHS Report Slams Insurers Premium Hikes While Pocketing Record Profits
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Profits for the nation’s 10 largest health insurance companies increased 250 percent between 2000 and 2009—10 times faster than inflation—but that hasn’t stopped the private insurance industry from trying to reach even deeper into consumers’ pocketbooks with huge premium increases.
According to a new report from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the nation’s five largest insurance companies took in combined profits of $12.2 billion last year, up 56 percent over 2008.
But companies such as Anthem Blue Cross of California, owned by WellPoint, which enjoyed a $4.7 billion profit in 2009, want more. Anthem announced this month it would raise premiums on 800,000 Californians by as much as 39 percent. Insurers in several other states are seeking similar hikes. Says HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius:
Over the last year, America’s largest insurance companies have requested premium increases of 56 percent in Michigan, 24 percent in Connecticut, 23 percent in Maine, 20 percent in Oregon, and 16 percent in Rhode Island, to name just a few states. Premium increases have left thousands of families that are already struggling during the economic downturn with an unpleasant choice between fewer benefits, higher premiums, or having no insurance at all. Hard-working families deserve better.
The HHS report says the increases are five to 10 times larger than the growth rate in national health expenditures and are “disturbing examples of the problems that make reforming our health insurance system more important than ever.”
In California, after a huge public outcry and criticism from the Obama administration and Congress, Anthem delayed its rate increases and WellPoint CEO Angela Braly will soon appear before the U.S. House Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee to answer questions about the premium hikes.
Click here for the full HHS report.
In a related health care development, 8.5 million seniors and people with disabilities enrolled in the private for-profit Medicare Advantage programs are seeing their premiums jump by about 14 percent this year, but some may see rate increases as high as 31 percent, according to a report released today.
Leslie Spindle, vice president of Avalere Health, a data analysis firm that issued the report, told the Associated Press:
These premium increases fit within a broader trend of increased financial pressure on the insured. We see very large premium increases and a continued upward creep in how much out-of-pocket expenses beneficiaries are expected to pay, such as co-payments.
Medicare Advantage was designed as a pilot program to privatize Medicare during the Bush administration. It allows seniors to receive their benefits through private insurers who, in turn, are reimbursed by the federal government.
But currently, the government pays private insurance companies, on average, 13 percent more for providing coverage to Medicare Advantage clients than it would pay for the same care under traditional Medicare. Says Medicare spokesman Peter Ashkenaz:
The plans need to explain why these increases are necessary.
Meanwhile, the health care reform debate reignites next week with a televised White House bipartisan health care reform summit. Prior to the Thursday event, the Obama administration is expected to unveil a new health care reform plan that combines elements of the House- and Senate-passed bills. News reports say Republicans also will present a plan.
The details of the proposals are not known. But as AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said:
The Massachusetts post-election polling made one thing clear: The country will not accept a tax on working families’ health care benefits.
We will keep you posted.
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10 Comments
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Do we have a 2 party system? We’ll know soon.
If we truly have a legitimate 2 party system, and if Democrats start doing the business of the people, then even Harry Reid should win for fun in November. If they keep dancing the “Tom Dashle Two-Step,” they’ll go down in fire. We should know the course the Democrats take no later than early March, evidenced by how they handle finishing on health care. If they come down from the illusion of “bi-partisanship” and drive health care with the public option through budget reconciliation, then hope is alive. If they come away empty handed, they’re doomed; and the sin of that is that after the 8 year tragedy of Cheney/bush, the Democrats should have assumed majority status for at least 50 years. We’ll know soon if we truly have a 2 party system.
If the bill goes through and the barrier between the states is broken down so that we can negotiate with other lower rate insurance coverage, would the unions look into starting up their own coverage for all union members at lower rates and better coverage then is available from those same insurance companies?
The administration’s health care proposal is now out and still includes a tax on health benefits. Such a tax is based on a completely wrong concept–the idea that the health plans of working people are the cause of the rise in costs and should therefore be curtailed.
It is simply not true that in order for everyone to have health care, some of us have to give something up.
We must refuse to pit workers who have coverage against all the people who are fighting to win health benefits.
What we have to give up is the private profit making health insurance companies that gouge us with escalating premiums as they deny us care. Their removal will save the funds needed to expand coverge for all of us as well as extend care to those without.
We all need all medically necessary care. Everybody in, nobody out. Improved Medicare for All. HR 676.
unionsforsinglepayer.org
Kay is correct, all summer long members have asked then President Sweeney why he is not for Medicare for All. We have asked PResident Trumka. Now look at the mess we are in. Taxing plans, mandates, no insurance company regulations to keep costs down. All summer long we have asked for health care reform, not health insurance “reform” or corporate welfare!
Does the AFL-CIO “leadership” have any interest whatever in representing the demands of it’s membership or critical needs of the majority of unorganized working people?
Apparently, even the “public option” in any form, is not to be included in the corporate profiteering “Health Care Reform”. Obama
and the Democrats are trying to rush it through Congress at any cost. Check out this article from today’s CommonDreams:
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2010/02/22-6
Published on Monday, February 22, 2010 by Huffington Post
Obama Health Care Plan Drops Public Option
by Ryan Grim
Despite the recent surge of support in the Senate for a government-run health insurance option, President Obama chose not to include one of the most popular elements of reform in the plan he is presenting to a bipartisan group of lawmakers Thursday.
The Obama plan explicitly bridges the differences between Senate and House legislation on issues both large and small, but on the public option — which is included in the House bill, but not in the Senate’s — Obama is entirely silent.
…
========================================
Obama and the Democrats once again demonstrate their complete contempt of the needs of working people. The entire agenda of Obama has been to restore billions of profits to Wall Street, the bankers, the military-industrial complex, the oil companies, nuclear and coal polluters, and even to continue and increase global warming with “cap and trade” legislation that keeps profitable polluters in business. Obama’s give-aways to corporate interests has no end!
All of this has created historic trillion dollar deficits that threatens to further collapse U.S. corporate imperial power. The cure to the deficit is to attack every possible public program possible that usually do not provide profit to some corporation.
Why not raise some taxes on the filthy rich corporations and individuals? Hell NO!
The super-rich corporations and individuals put Obama and the Democrats into power with huge campaign contributions,
“revolving door” positions in their companies, control the mass media, to get these vast additions to their wealth.
Thus every essential public and social program at every level of government is to shut-down, or so impoverished as to effectively destroy the programs. Thus public education funding is slashed,maintain corporate profiteering health care to bankrupt millions of workers, continue profitable wars for oil and resources, etc.
Obama and the Democrats are not doing anything serious to create millions of jobs as the capitalist economic system is incapable of providing quality “living wage jobs”. Millions of jobs
have gone to China.
The refusal of the leadership of organized labor to act under these crises conditions is going to have unpredictable and inevitably dire consequences to working people and organized labor itself.
What more can be said? Are all comments here a total waste of time?
(Read the World Socialist Web Site http://www.wsws.org )
What is so difficult about the concept of universal single payer basic health care access financed by taxes? Why do we keep holding on to a dinosaur that is eating us alive? I mean health insurance and employer based health insurance coverage. The USA is ranked 37th in health care outcomes by the World Health Organization. We think we have the best system but we are deluding ourselves. We may have the best technology but if you are unemployed or one of the working poor, your access to care is limited or non-existant. It is time to rethink our “business as usual” policies. Past time to admit the system is broken. Time to realize that it is nearly impossible to become a “self-made man” with unlimited monies. We need each other to achieve common goals, just as we achieved civil rights, child labor laws, the 40 hour work week and voting rights for women.
Public option or controlled insurance rates will do practically the same thing, “if” it is controlled to meet the needs of the working class,NOT insurance lobbist! On health care reform,please do not come up with another “watered down version “like the credit card bill that gave bankers a free hand to change all their rules and a year to do it!! Basically, we are at a loss as long as the corporate lobbist pay out large amounts of benefits to are law makers. I am a true beleiver in unions, they have leveraged great benefits for the middle class workers over the years, some gave their all! But,whether you are a repub or a demo you will not be represented by your representatives as long as there are corporate lobbist! Sorry to say, the corprations now own the supreme court too! Lobbing MUST go and Americans must begin to pay our representatives so they can run one time for office in some efficient manner! Until then, we will have too many lobbist and not enough workers to give our children a better life….it will be the end of the middle class!
It would be simpler and cheaper if we had just one merged Republicrat Party headed up by Joe Lieberman. But that would look undemocratic. No, its much better to have two that are both beholden to same big corporations to finance their campaigns, two that agree to pretend that the tiny nuances that occasionally separate them are really momentous. If not for the planned failure of the Democrats as either a ‘majority’ or as a minority, the Republicans would never have a chance of getting elected.
The hyper-greedy robber barons who run the ‘health’ insurance industry see no reason to pretend to go along with even the most toothless of ‘reforms’. The Obama administration’s approach has been to start with guaranteeing to the superthieves that they will continue to suck our blood forever, in the hope that they would go along with a few minor changes to make it look like something is happening. The unions are demobilized by a leadership with the loyalty to our masters of an abused wife. The popular organizations were sucked into the Obama campaign and remain dazed and confused on the sidelines. What a sham.
Insurance companies are raising premiums because they can! The have an anti-trust exemption and with the help of lazy, rubber-stamping regulators, have formed a monopoly.
Congress, with all its feigned concern, is unwilling to do anything about breaking up this insurance monopoly.
A search for — insurance anti-trust — brings up many articles. A good overall one is from the LA Times at http://articles.latimes.com/2009/nov/02/business/fi-hiltzik2
Ending the anti-trust exemption must be the first step in healthcare reform.
An ardent supporter of single-payer healthcare, Congressman Eric Massa of New York was just one of two Democrats who voted against the healthcare legislation for the right reasons. In January, Congressman Massa spoke about the next steps for Medicare for All during the monthly Healthcare For All/Single-Payer Issue Organizing Team conference call. As a follow-up, the congressman wrote the following:
Three Tracks For Health Reform
Dear Grace,
So here we are in the middle of February, 2010. The House and Senate have passed health care bills similar in less important sections but differing on crucial aspects. What now?
I suggest a “three track” approach.
The first is that in the short term, we support any realistic initiatives to improve either existing bill. And we also endorse new single bills, such as one removing the anti-trust protection for private health insurance and medical malpractice insurance firms. Another should end private insurance exclusions because of pre-existing conditions and annual and life-time caps on benefits. I am working on these now.
The second track is for activists to work hard in states where single-payer healthcare has the greatest public support. A national agency should coordinate local action and raise national funds for those states best positioned to be successful. Concentration of funding and organizing on these “best bets” states is crucial. Success in even one state would be monumental.
Third is a complimentary federal track. We support a bill allowing the federal government to recognize and encourage, with money and technical assistance, integrated state systems meeting certain criteria. States should be allowed to fully incorporate their existing Medicaid and SCHIP programs and funding into a single comprehensive program, and qualify for additional federal dollars. In such cases, private insurance becomes subordinate to this public program. Parallel to this, a bill expanding age eligibility for Medicare is crucial.
At the same time we must point out that this approach requires neither individual nor employer mandates. The only requirement is that every enrolled citizen pay toward the general cost of health care.
Finally, we must continue to make logically sound, careful arguments for health reform, using the best data and studies.
That means focusing on the health needs of 300 million Americans. Individual cases can be used, but only to illustrate conclusions based on a wide range of data.
By doing all these together, progress is still possible.
Regards,
Congressman Eric Massa