Today in the News - Insurers Poised To Gain From Health Care Reform

I've been following the news on the health care crisis pretty closely.  A story in today's Hartford Courant is a bit troubling to me.  Insurers Poised To Gain From Health Care Reform

    Insurers want any reform to maintain what they call a "level playing field" on which companies are able to compete based on efficiency and service — something they say a government plan would undermine.

    "They would have a huge price advantage over us," said Mickey Herbert, chief executive of ConnectiCare, the Farmington-based health insurer. "And over time, you'd expect individuals and employers to migrate to lower rates."
   Private insurance would be forced to compete with the public plan payment rates, Herbert said.
   "In fairly short order, private insurance and our employer-sponsored health insurance system end up atrophying greatly, and we're on a slippery slope to a single-payer system," Herbert wrote recently to Congress.

The insurance companies themselves are saying that government can provide insurance at lower cost than they can.  Their arguments against a public option are centered on the fact that they will lose business.  Mr. Herbert fails to say why a single-payer system would be a bad thing, just beware the dreaded slippery slope.  In the realm of logical fallacies, it was more an Appeal to Consequences than it was a Slippery Slope. 

Reading the Building a Sustainable Health Care System document from WellPoint, it appears that a good part of their solution is for insurance companies to get more involved in the delivery end of health care - determining what is available, from whom and for how much.  This sounds very much like the getting-between-you-and-your-doctor stuff that people are concerned about. 

It appears they want the government to take on more responsibility for individuals with chronic conditions, as well as keeping the responsibility for the elderly and the poor.  Apparently the dreaded government-paid health care is good enough for those who aren't going to make a profit for the insurance companies. 

They don't start talking about reforms that are needed within the insurance industry until page 10 of the 16-page document.  It seems that all we need is more government money to fund the more expensive high-risk folks,  fewer regulations on insurance companies and changes to the tax code to give individuals and employers more money to pay for insurance premiums. 

This just doesn't sound like any kind of solution to me.  WellPoint appears to want more of a voice in care decisions.  They want to take the healthiest and most profitable of us as customers and leave the rest of us to government to care for.  Those of us who pay taxes would pay more to cover the increasing number of high-risk people getting government care and so that the low-income among us can afford to pay their insurance premiums.  The only winner I see coming out of WellPoint's plan is WellPoint.

I don't blame WellPoint for taking the position that they're taking, but their plan is all about sustaining their business model, not creating a sustainable health care system. They're as much as telling us in their document that they can't do anyting to improve the health care situation other than point out what providers, taxpayers and consumers should be doing.  I don't know that we need them to do that. 

I'm pretty sure that we don't need to be paying them to do that.  I think that if there needs to be some agreement on acceptable levels of service, that health care providers, patient advocates and government health officials can come up with something without help from the insurance companies.  If tax dollars are to be spent on health care, I want that money to be in the control of the taxpayers, through our government.  We have a lot greater chance for transparency from government than we do from the private insurance industry. 

I understand that the health insurance companies want to protect their profits, but in the big picture, this really can't be our primary consideration.


FT