I could be wrong, but doesn't this statement by CA Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner's office on the heels of the obscene rate hike by Anthem of 39% on individual policies in California seem just a wee bit mendacious:
The Department of Insurance plans to hire an actuarial firm to look into Anthem's "alarming" rate increases
Anthem raised premiums in March last year by as much as 43%.
Forty Three Percent.
Where was the outrage then? Well he is running for Governor after all . . .
Poizner has been the elected Insurance Commissioner since 2007, by his own admission he slashed the department budget by 15% according to this recent article:
http://sanfrancisco.bizjournals.com/....
"I have been able to streamline the Department of Insurance and cut my state operations budget by nearly 15 percent. With these lower costs, I have ordered CDI to reduce the fees that we charge."
The Department gets funding from the Insurance companies and he has reduced those charges on top of the already 15% cut, starving the budget further.
Granted. state budget cuts required that budgets be trimmed but Poizner claims he had the cuts ready to go before the state budget cuts. So, he was already planning on slashing the department anyway, the state financial crisis merely gave him the fig leaf to do so. He also eliminated 200 positions in the Department.
So now he expects people to believe he is going to "hire an independent actuarial firm" to look in to these "alarming" rate increases? Well . . .
http://www.youtube.com/...
Last year, when Anthem raised rates in March by as much as 43% Poizner did exactly - what?
One guy in Century City near Los Angeles says he will now be forced to pay over $27,000 in premiums. Wrap your head around that. $27,000. In another case, a family's insurance premium in San Rafael is now larger than their mortgage - in Marin County, one of the wealthiest counties in the country.
To be fair, the CDI went after Anthem and made them restore 2330 illegally rescinded policies, reimburse those consumers and pay a $1 million fine in February, 2009. The previous year Anthem had to cough up $10 million on similar charges doing the same thing to HMO policyholders, that settlement was with the state Department of Managed Health Care. But that does nothing about these obscenely immoral premium increases.
Anthem controls about half the individual insurance policies in California.
Perhaps the sickest thing of all in this whole kabuki is that if someone is turned away from the private marketplace and cannot get insurance from Anthem they might be forced to go into a state pool (with a $75,000 cap BTW) which is administered by . . . Anthem.
So the company that just raised rates 39% virtually insuring (sick pun intended) that people who cannot afford the rates and are now going to be naked without insurance will be also insuring that an entire new pool of customers might be forced to pay them again - through its administration of the state program.
http://www.consumerwatchdog.org/...
A bit off topic but equally germane is the other department which is supposed to watchdog health insurance providers in California - the Department of Managed Health Care - which (despite its much trumpeted settlement with Anthem in 2008) has a record of siding with insurance companies in appeals regarding denied care. According to this database:
http://www.hmohelp.ca.gov/...
of the 8,929 Independent Medical Review decisions adjudicated since 2001, 5,929 of them were in favor of the insurance company - almost 60%.
Last week the parent company of Anthem - Wellpoint - announced an eightfold increase in profit for the last three months of 2009.
Insurance companies get to keep up to 30 cents of every dollar they collect on these policies. Medicare keeps less than a dime.
This bullshit has to stop, how can this go on and on and on?
It is destroying our country.
Enough
is
Enough.