They're at it again. This time it's California's Blue Shield raising rates on people in the individual market by as much as 59%. Today's San Francisco Chronicle reports:
Company spokesman Johnny Wong said the increases, averaging 30 percent, affect 193,000 individual policyholders. "Despite these increases, which we are loath to do, we're not making any money," he said, referring to the individual market.
Blue Shield is, technically, a non-profit, so in theory they're not supposed to be 'making any money'. But how can you possibly justify a rate increase of 30%?
Did inflation go up by 30%? I don't think so. Did drug costs go up by 30%? Unlikely. Did doctors and nurses decide to start charging 30% more? Yeah, right. Did your top executives earn 30% more in salary and bonuses? Or maybe 50%? Hmmm... There's no information about their CEO's compensation anywhere that I could find, so who knows?
But how about this?
The Chronicle reported last month that Blue Shield informed some of its individual policyholders that their premiums will go up in the low single digits because of the federal law, plus an additional 18 percent to account for a new state law that will prohibit insurers from charging women more for insurance than men.
Come again? Is Blue Shield correspondingly reducing premiums on women because they can no longer charge them more than men? If so, this is the first I've heard of it, and the article makes no mention of such a phenomenon.
Even assuming there is some kind of justification for these increases (and let's recall that last year, Anthem Blue Cross of California wanted to raise rates an average of 39%, but after the outrage expressed and investigations by the California Insurance Commissioner, settled for a mere 14% increase), this is so far over the top that it is hard to believe people are not marching on Sacramento with pitchforks as I write.
The California Insurance Commissioner does not now have the authority to regulate health insurance rates. Nonetheless our new commissioner, Dave Jones, taking office just a few days ago has already commented on these hikes:
I think this is business as usual in the state of California,...We've seen 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 percent increases year over year and it underscores why I need the authority to be able to reject excessive premium increases."
That would be a good step, and according to the article, Assembyman Mike Feuer has introduced legislation to require health insurers to receive approval for their rate hikes.
But that is not going to save California or the rest of the country from going bankrupt with 10% and more per annum premium increases coupled with ever higher deductibles and inexorably rising out-of-pocket limits. The latest figures show that the United States now spends 17.2% of its GDP on health care, far higher than any other industrialized country.
The only solution is to "kill all the insurers". The only solution is single-payer, a system that works and works well in other industrialized countries at far less cost. We have to remove the insurance companies from the equation, and the only way to do that is single payer.
In a wonderful diary about a week ago, Nyceve writes about the push for California OneCare, single-payer health insurance for California, and how she and other Kossacks are involved.
If not now, with a Democratic Governor, an overwhelmingly Democratic legislature, and mounting health care costs that will eventually bankrupt an already nearly-bankrupt state whose finances could be positively affected by single-payer, then when?
Stop the madness. Please.