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In Quick Retreat, Insurers Say They’ll Cover Sick Kids After All
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Arrogance allows you to do just about anything and think you can get away with it. For years, health insurers have swaggered about, callously raising premiums through the roof, dropping sick people from coverage and refusing to cover folks with pre-existing conditions. They got away with it. But not yesterday.
After media reports surfaced that big insurance companies claimed a loophole in the new health care reform law would allow them to deny coverage to children with pre-existing conditions, the—well you know—hit the fan. Picking on sick kids is like kicking a dog or stealing Grandma’s purse. It doesn’t sit well with most Americans.
After mounting public outrage and a strongly worded letter from Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, the insurance industry quickly reversed course and promised to cover kids with pre-existing conditions beginning Sept. 23 as the new law requires. In a letter to the industry group American Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), Sebelius wrote:
Health insurance reform is designed to prevent any child from being denied coverage because he or she has a pre-existing condition…Now is not the time to search for nonexistent loopholes that preserve a broken system.
To ensure that there is no ambiguity on this point, I am preparing to issue regulations in the weeks ahead ensuring that the term ‘pre-existing condition exclusion’ applies to both a child’s access to a plan and to his or her benefits once he or she is in the plan.
In response, AHIP President Karen Ignagni wrote:
We await and will fully comply with regulations consistent with the principles described in your letter.
But she also wrote that insurance companies would be analyzing how much it would cost to comply-code words for “rate hike.”
At FireDogLake David Dayen lays out a likely scenario.
You can pretty much figure out AHIP’s game here. With no restrictions on cost until 2014, the industry can raise their premium prices almost at will. Even the bad publicity suffered from that 39 percent rate hike of Anthem Blue Cross plan has stopped that scheduled increase from taking effect in May. And when outrage is expressed by families facing double-digit rate hikes, AHIP will clear their throats and blame the pre-existing condition exclusion for exclusion for children, forcing the poor insurance companies to take on a sicker risk pool and raise prices to survive.
It takes a long time to beat down world class arrogance.
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13 Comments
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What about the “loophole” of $100.00 a day fines for NOT covering pre-existing conditions? If a person has a costly condition and they are short term terminal the Insurance Industry could determine that it is “cost effective” to pay the fines and hope for the best which of course is the “worst” for the patient. To the For Profits this is the “cost of doing business.” And this is one more reason why SINGLE PAYER WORKS FOR EVERYONE. But this is the way our BOUGHT and PAID CONGRESS does, they ALWAYS leave more than enough WIGGLE ROOM for their CORPORATE BENEFACTORS. And Labor’s Leadership are just GAGA about that idea, because they always, GET ALONG & GO ALONG. U.S. LABOR PARTY.
AHIP President Karen Ignagni was there during the talks when the health care legislation was being written. Just to read the fact the insurance companies “found a loophole” and wanting to deny children is pathetic. Blue Cross and Blue Shield, just this week denied coverage for a newborn with a heart defect claiming it was a “pre-existing condition”. Goes to show the insurance companies had no business writing the legislation for this so-called “historic” bill. Greed and profit is written all over thier faces, and they will continue to raise premiums to policy holders. This bill was indeed a bailout to insurance companies. Shame on the AFL-CIO for endorsing this garbage. Yes this bill was better than no bill, BUT if you are going to do it wrong, why not do it right?
All the more reason to push for single payer option. The insurance companies are sleazy and underhanded, caring only about profits. Health care should be non-profit, PERIOD! No one should make a profit from someone else’s suffering. I think the insurance companies are slitting their own throats by trying to find non-existent loopholes to avoid covering sick people. The outrage this causes will grain more support for public option and single payer. Go insurance companies! Your unbridled greed will be your downfall.
The “Health Care Reform” bill is nothing if not a bonanza for the insurance industry, an escape for the corporations and will do nothing to give us the health care we are need and deserve. Read the latest from Counterpunch magazine.
http://www.counterpunch.com/zeese03292010.html
This is what happens with an insurance, for-profit model of health care delivery.
The AFL-CIO should have demanded Medicare for All and the insurance industry would no longer be in the Director’s chair.
I wouldn’t doubt for a minute that AHIP wants to game the Govt into unloading the Kids coverage onto a public option, much like they did with Medicare and older Americans who need more Health Care.
Let’s remember, they have NO SHAME, NOR HONOR, and so, will squeeze every dollar they can, from all they can, for as long as they can.
I think this country has gotten so greedy. How can you deny children medical help. We will soon have no country or become an 4th rated country. What happend to the once great country of ours. We have stopped thinging about our fellow man and has put the all mighty dollar in front of everyone. We need to change for the better for everyone. Can someone explain why other countries can have an health care program that works for the masses, but not us?
“Can someone explain why other countries can have an health care program that works for the masses, but not us?”
Yes! In other countries the health care programs were the result of on-going POLITICAL STRUGGLE, in some cases going back over 100 years. The trade union struggle for good contracts with employers was always combined with a SOCIALIST POLITICAL PARTY.
That is, a socialist political party that ran candidates for political office to gain political power to enact these government administered health care plans. A socialist party represents the economic interests of the vast majority of people in society, the working people.
Working people in other countries long ago realized that wages and benefits secured from employers is simply inadequate to provide for health care for everyone. The corporate profiteering was excluded and not allowed to function in the national health plans of most other countries.
Incredibly, the new AFL-CIO President Trumka refused to follow the unanimous decision of the delegates to the Pittsburgh
convention for “medicare for all” single-payer health care.
Instead, the AFL-CIO and organized labor has continually supported the Democratic Party and now President Obama in this
anti-labor and totally corrupt pro-corporate “Health Care Reform”.
Today it is critically important that organized labor stop supporting either Democratic or Republican Parties because both are totally controlled by corporate campaign contributions (bribes), overwhelmed by corporate lobbyists, and hear nothing but the demands of Wall Street, Big Business, and the “health care” lobbyists.
A new socialist political party, which represents the economic interests of all working people – organized and unorganized, is now the only hope of breaking the hold of corporate interests that are looting the economy to further enrich a tiny minority of millionaires and billionaires.
Without a new political party to run working people’s candidates at every level of government, we see the continued destruction of this country. Public education, along with health care, is being destroyed because the wealthy don’t want to pay taxes.
This country is being turned into a “third world” country for working people due to the active complicity of the organized labor movement “leadership”.
Health Care?
I seriously dough that Washington D.C. (District of Corruption) is capable of coming up with ANYTHING that will TRULY benefit the American people, and not just another cash cow wind fall for the biggest campaign bribers who give $100s of billions in campaigns bribes and millions for lobbyist, and has milked billions from the American people over the last five decades that I know of. That’s not who they work for. The corruption is too wide and too deep.
The MONEY!
FACT: Drug companies contribute 70% of all the campaign bribes, Wall Street $100 of millions, Banks $100 of millions, the health industry $100 of millions, Corporations $100 of millions, and so on. Do you think that if someone gives you $100 of millions they don’t want something in return?
The truth is our so called representatives will never (they have to pay up for all their campaign bribes) cut any profits from the insurance, drug companies, medical industry, or Wall Street. That’s where the $100s of billions has been going for decades, and that’s where the money really should be coming from to finance health reform.
However I wouldn’t hold my breath.
Same game just different players, THEIR ONLY PURPOSE IS TO GET DONE WHAT THE PEOPLE THAT BRIBE THEM WANT…
“Maximum profit regardless of the social and environmental costs”…
I seriously dough that Washington D.C. (District of Corruption) is capable of coming up with ANYTHING that will TRULY benefit the American people, and not just another cash cow wind fall for the biggest campaign bribers who give $100s of billions in campaigns bribes and millions for lobbyist, and has milked billions from the American people over the last five decades that I know of. That’s not who they work for. The corruption is too wide and too deep.
Do you really need that surgery or do they just need to make another yacht payment?.
The MONEY!
FACT: Drug companies contribute 70% of all the campaign bribes, Wall Street $100 of millions, Banks $100 of millions, the health industry $100 of millions, Corporations $100 of millions, and so on. Do you think that if someone gives you $100 of millions they don’t want something in return?
The truth is our so called representatives will never (they have to pay up for all their campaign bribes) cut any profits from the insurance, drug companies, medical industry, or Wall Street. That’s where the $100s of billions has been going for decades, and that’s where the money really should be coming from to finance health reform.
However I wouldn’t hold my breath.
Same game just different players, THEIR ONLY PURPOSE IS TO GET DONE WHAT THE PEOPLE THAT BRIBE THEM WANT…
“Maximum profit regardless of the social and environmental costs”…
The one provision in the health care reform (health insurance, not care) that I wholeheartedly support actually has nothing to do with health care. The changes made to student loans apparently turn it into a program of direct loans from the government, eliminating the bankers as middlemen, and making the loans much more available and affordable to poor students. What a concept! Too bad it was not applied to the private ‘health’ insurance companies, who will continue to be allowed to steal billions from the populace as obtuse and greedy middlemen. In fact, it is now law that private health insurance is essential – the ultimate in idiocy. I guess the pols figured that they already took care of their banker buddies with the unbelievable giveaway of bailout billions and defanging the regulation bill.
The working people of this country will forever be screwed by “Health Care Reform” until the gangster corporations are completely eliminated by passing a universal “Medicare for All”
single-payer system.
Perhaps the AFL-CIO is proven incapable of leading the way to make this happen? Perhaps we need a new movement for the economic interests of working people independent of existing organized labor, a new political party independent of both Democratic and Republican parties, independent of corporate money and agendas.
Published on Wednesday, March 31, 2010 by The Huffington Post
Insurance Industry Already Finding Ways to Game New System
(This link to full article:)
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2010/03/31-4
by Dan Froomkin
The insurance industry’s attempt to weasel out of one of the few provisions of the new health care reform law that took effect immediately is a harbinger of what’s to come.
In this case, the companies that were balking at covering sick children quickly relented under media, congressional and White House pressure.
But far from being satisfied with a windfall of new customers and massive government subsidies, the nation’s insurance companies appear to already be busy devising ways to game the new system. Their goal, as ever: Maximizing profits by paying out as little on actual health care as possible.
And next time they start to weasel, Congress and the White House — and the media — may not be paying attention anymore.