It is heartening to read that Wendell Potter agrees with Rick Ungar and other commentators that the death of big-profit health insurance is near at hand:
Aetna CEO Mark Bertolini caused quite a stir when he said at a Las Vegas conference a few days ago that the insurance industry as we know it is, for all practical purposes, a dinosaur on the verge of extinction.
Time to sing, “Ding dong the witch is dead”? Not quite, but the day when most Americans get their coverage from what we think of as an insurance company is close at hand. It won’t be long before most of us get coverage through either a state or federal government-run plan or a local nonprofit company. The big investor-owned corporations like Aetna and the companies I used to work for, Cigna and Humana, know that the days of making a killing off of basic medical insurance policies are over. And the companies have no one to blame but themselves and a fatally flawed, uniquely American system of providing access to care.
Sorry for all the bold, but it's good stuff, and Wendell is correct: the greedy Mark Bertolinis of the world have no one to blame for themselves for the impending death of their big-profit health 'protection' racket.
Bertolini ticked off a number of reasons why providing basic health insurance to Americans was no longer viable — changes in demographics and the economy and, of course, health care reform at both the state and federal levels. What he did not say was that the standard operating practices of the industry were simply not sustainable and actually contributed more to the demise of the business model than any external factors.
Yup, it does indeed appear that the moral arc of the universe bends towards justice, to borrow King's words -- the immoral practices of denying the sick, declining the sick, dumping the sick and ignoring the sick that were the source of so many riches for the likes of Aetna and Cigna are now coming to bite them...err...kill their golden goose:
Ever since the health insurance industry came to be dominated in recent years by a handful of big for-profit corporations, insurers have actually been driving away customers and shrinking the universe of people they were willing to cover, because of the return on investment and the profit demands of the large institutional investors that own most of the corporations’ shares. It is because of those demands that insurers price their premiums beyond the reach of millions of Americans. It is because of those demands that insurers reject on average a third or more of all applicants because of “preexisting conditions.” And it is because of those demands that insurers have routinely canceled the coverage of thousands of policyholders when they got sick. Now you know why more than 50 million of us are uninsured. It is not because most of those people are being irresponsible. Most of them either can’t afford to buy coverage or can’t buy it at any price.
Wendell also drops a nice nugget of proof that premium rises really are about nothing other than more profits for Wall Street:
As a former managed-care analyst was quoted as saying in Barron’s last October, “There’s no organic growth left in this business except for pricing.”
In other words, the only way that insurers can continue to satisfy their Wall Street masters is by raising prices on poor, vulnerable, sick people.
This is exactly why every other developed country in the entire world does not do big-profit basic health insurance -- it only works as a business model when that business is cruel and perverted, and, more importantly, it's not good for people...or their health.
That's why an improved Medicare-for-all system is so important, and that's why it's something for which we must continue to fight.
Wendell's right that we can't start singing this yet, but soon, very soon: