Insurance Space

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.

One of the strongest supporters of a bill to prohibit health insurance companies from setting annual and lifetime limits on the amounts they will pay couldn’t be at a legislative hearing on the measure Wednesday because he has cancer and was getting a blood transfusion.

Since Richard “Rocky” D’Andrea’s cancer was discovered in 2008, the 63-year-old Limerick man also found out that his insurance policy carried a $250,000 lifetime cap, his wife Theresa told the Insurance and Financial Services Committee. Now the couple are struggling to keep their house. Their credit cards are maxed and they’ve spent all of their savings and retirement, she said.

Americans want to be covered by health insurance, but which one is best? Are there any we should watch-out for? Experts warn that some plans don’t cover enough and others aren’t accepted by enough doctors.

Now that health care is stalled in Congress, there is a surge in health insurance offers both online and on the television. But be careful. There are two types of plans watchdogs are worried about, according to Elizabeth Leamy with the ABC network.

The US Congress is currently considering proposals to overhaul the nation’s health care system. On 7 November 2009, the House of Representatives passed the “Affordable Health Care for America Act” (H.R. 3962), and, on 24 December 2009, the Senate passed the “Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act” (H.R. 3590). The House and Senate bills, which differ from each other in material respects, are now in the hands of a Joint Conference Committee of the two chambers, whose mandate it is to seek to reconcile the two bills. If the reconciliation process is successful, the Conference Committee report will go back to each chamber to be voted upon. If adopted by both the House and the Senate, the Conference Committee report will be presented to President Obama for his signature.   

UnitedHealth Group Inc., the biggest U.S. health insurer by revenue, beat analysts’ estimates for fourth-quarter profit as sales of coverage for the elderly grew and costs for treating swine flu tapered off.

Net income rose 30 percent to $944 million, or 81 cents a share, from $726 million, or 60 cents, a year earlier, when a $350 million legal settlement damped results, the Minnetonka, Minnesota-based company said today in a statement.