Health Insurance Forum

The wonder of health insurance

by mahir on 05/05/10 at 8:34 am

Having struggled even the modest health care reforms of the Patient safety and reasonable Care Act, insurers now look to be falling all over themselves to make good.

But that is not what makes me wonder. That is politics, requiring getting on the superior side of the winners. What makes me wonder is about the financial realities these insurers claim the rest of us do not understand that just make them act the way they do.

Huge growths in premiums for individual policy holders are essential to cover bigger costs and bigger risks in the market. Remember the 40 percent fee rise WellPoint of California declared in the middle of the Congressional disputation. Says a Los Angeles Times report WellPoint acknowledged mistakes in its rate filing calling them accidental misestimating. Apparently, an outside actuarial firm reworked WellPoint’s miscalculations and said a 10% boost would do. Quite the margin of error.
Meanwhile, WellPoint’s earnings grew by 50 percent in the first quarter of 2010.
And how about the essential rescissions you know, when an insurer cancels a policyholder’s coverage looking back and, just coincidently, when the policyholder is undergoing expensive medical care.

In late April, Health Insurance Group, Human and WellPoint declared they would stop that awful practice. It was necessary before, but not now?
This matter should make us all wonder. And it should create our legislators highly serious viewers when the insurance companies explain as certainly they will how the market forces them to amplify premiums in response to PPACA as its various commissariat are rolled out.