Insurance Space

The scope of a congressional investigation into health insurance rate hikes in California expanded Tuesday as lawmakers summoned the chief executives of four of the nation’s largest for-profit health insurers to testify about medical claims denied for individuals with pre-existing conditions.

The House Committee on Energy and Commerce and its investigations subcommittee are targeting the practices of WellPoint Inc., UnitedHealth Group, Humana Inc. and Aetna.

The companies provide insurance to a large share of the estimated 17 million Americans who buy individual insurance policies because they do not have health coverage through jobs.

Unmarried older women are twice as likely to be without health insurance than are their married peers. This was the finding of a new policy brief from the University of California Center for Health Policy Research, which evaluated health issues and health insurance coverage among approximately 3 million older women.

According to Roberta Wyn, associate director of the center and the study’s lead author, women ages 50 to 64 face a “time of critical change,” because not only are they “at risk of new and complex health conditions, but as they near the age of retirement, their insurance status may change too.”

The Obama administration announced its support Tuesday for a bill by Rep. Betsy Markey to end antitrust exemptions for health insurance companies.

“The president announced the administration’s strong support for repealing the antitrust exemption currently enjoyed by health insurers because, at its core, health reform is all about ensuring that American families and businesses have more choices, benefit from more competition and have greater control over their own health care,” White House spokesman Adam Abrams told the Coloradoan.

“The president believes we need to set some common-sense rules of the road to make competitive markets work for families and help rein in the soaring cost of health care, and he appreciates Congresswoman Markey’s efforts to do just that.”

Health insurers across the country are dramatically increasing rates and slashing benefits for many of the 17 million consumers who have individual insurance policies. The issue is being addressed by the President, as he attempts to create an affordable insurance package in his overhaul of healthcare in the United States.

Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield in California, for example, has announced a rate increase of 39 to 60%. Currently, however, consumers have very little option except to pay the increase or drop coverage as affordable options are few.

Revving up for next week’s bipartisan health care summit, President Barack Obama slammed greedy health insurance companies on Saturday.

A California insurance firm is hiking rates by an average of 25 percent, he said, while one in Kansas is boosting rates by up to 20 percent.

Obama’s right-on money quote in his Saturday weekly address:

“The bottom line is that the status quo is good for the insurance industry and bad for America. Over the past year, as families and small business owners have struggled to pay soaring health care costs, and as millions of Americans lost their coverage, the five largest insurers made record profits of over $12 billion.”

Dramatic increases in health insurance rates aren’t limited to California, according to a report issued Thursday by the Obama administration that found insurers had asked for large rate hikes in at least six other states.

The report by the Department of Health and Human Services found, for example, that UnitedHealth, Tufts and Blue Cross requested rate increases of up to 16 percent in Rhode Island. Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan sought to raise rates by as much as 56 percent. Increases were also reported in Maine, Washington, Oregon and Connecticut.

Big, dominant insurance companies in Michigan and five other states continue to seek large rate hikes, a sign that the U.S. health insurance system is broken and needs reform, the nation’s health chief said today.

Citing a 56% rate hike that Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan sought last year for non-Medicare customers who buy their own insurance, Kathleen Sebelius, secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services said big increases sought “highlight the need to address comprehensive health reform.” She spoke in a media briefing from her Bethesda, Md.

As the prospect of a major health care overhaul expires with a terminal case of filibuster, the last week provided a clear diagnosis of what we will get instead.

We have seen the future, and it looks like Anthem Blue Cross.

Last week Anthem, providing coverage to 800,000 individual buyers in California, announced rate increases for next year of as much as 39 percent.

That’s not a misprint, even if you couldn’t afford to get your eyes checked lately.

First adopted for auto, property and casualty insurance under Proposition 103, “prior approval” or “rate regulation,” as it is known, has saved consumers billions of dollars. That’s why I am reintroducing legislation that would extend Proposition 103 to health insurance. Why would California provide less government oversight for health insurance – which can save people’s lives – than for auto insurance?

Today, the state Department of Insurance has only limited ability to explore whether the benefits covered by a health insurance policy are proportional to the premiums paid. If less than 70 percent of health care premium dollars are spent on providing health care, the insurance commissioner may investigate. Unfortunately, these “medical loss ratios” can be manipulated, and thus Californians have been hit with rate increase after rate increase with no intervention by the state.

Consumers in at least four states who buy their own health insurance are getting hit with premium increases of 15 percent or more — and people in other states could see the same thing.

Anthem Blue Cross, a subsidiary of WellPoint Inc., has been under fire for a week from regulators and politicians for notifying some of its 800,000 individual policyholders in California that it plans to raise rates by up to 39 percent March 1.

The Anthem Blue Cross plan in Maine is asking for increases of about 23 percent this year for some individual policyholders. Last year, they raised rates up to 32 percent.