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Time to Investigate Those Insurance Company Letters
Time to Investigate Those Insurance Company Letters
Paul Waldman
October 29, 2013
Are they trying to pull a fast one on their customers?
As a follow-up to this post, I want to talk about the thing that spawns some of these phony Obamacare victim stories: the letters that insurers are sending to people in the individual market. People all over the country are getting these letters, which say "We're cancelling your current policy because of the new health-care law. Here's another policy you can get for much more money." Reporters are doing stories about these people and their terrifying letters without bothering to check what other insurance options are available to them.
There's something fishy going on here, not just from the reporters, but from the insurance companies. It's time somebody did a detailed investigation of these letters to find out just what they're telling their customers. Because they could have told them, "As a result of the new health-care law, your plan, StrawberryCare, has now been changed to include more benefits. The premium is going up, just as your premium has gone up every year since forever." But instead, they're just eliminating those plans entirely and offering people new plans. If the woman I discussed from that NBC story is any indication, what the insurance company is offering is something much more expensive, even though they might have something cheaper available. They may be taking the opportunity to try to shunt people into higher-priced plans. It's as though you get a letter from your car dealer saying, "That 2010 Toyota Corolla you're leasing has been recalled. We can supply you with a Toyota Avalon for twice the price." They're not telling you that you can also get a 2013 Toyota Corolla for something like what you're paying now.
I'm not sure that's what's happening, and it may be happening only with some insurers but not others. But with hundreds of thousands of these letters going out and frightening people into thinking they have no choice but to sign up for a much more expensive plan, it's definitely something someone should look into. Like, say, giant news organizations with lots of money and resources.
Now, it should be said that when President Obama said during the debate over the Affordable Care Act in Congress that if you like your health coverage you can keep it, he was only half right. The reason he repeated it so many times was that he and his advisors firmly believed that one of the main reasons Bill Clinton's health-care reform failed was that it changed things too much for too many, and people fear change. In Clinton's plan, pretty much everybody not on Medicare or Medicaid would have had to go into a new insurance plan. That those plans might be better than what they had didn't matter; the idea frightened people. So the Obama administration took pains to emphasize that the government would not require anyone to change their insurance. That didn't mean they were guaranteeing that no insurance company would ever make changes to anyone's plan, because insurance companies do that all the time. But the law wouldn't mandate that, say, you leave Aetna and join Blue Cross.
- more -
http://prospect.org/article/time-investigate-those-insurance-company-letters
Paul Waldman
October 29, 2013
Are they trying to pull a fast one on their customers?
As a follow-up to this post, I want to talk about the thing that spawns some of these phony Obamacare victim stories: the letters that insurers are sending to people in the individual market. People all over the country are getting these letters, which say "We're cancelling your current policy because of the new health-care law. Here's another policy you can get for much more money." Reporters are doing stories about these people and their terrifying letters without bothering to check what other insurance options are available to them.
There's something fishy going on here, not just from the reporters, but from the insurance companies. It's time somebody did a detailed investigation of these letters to find out just what they're telling their customers. Because they could have told them, "As a result of the new health-care law, your plan, StrawberryCare, has now been changed to include more benefits. The premium is going up, just as your premium has gone up every year since forever." But instead, they're just eliminating those plans entirely and offering people new plans. If the woman I discussed from that NBC story is any indication, what the insurance company is offering is something much more expensive, even though they might have something cheaper available. They may be taking the opportunity to try to shunt people into higher-priced plans. It's as though you get a letter from your car dealer saying, "That 2010 Toyota Corolla you're leasing has been recalled. We can supply you with a Toyota Avalon for twice the price." They're not telling you that you can also get a 2013 Toyota Corolla for something like what you're paying now.
I'm not sure that's what's happening, and it may be happening only with some insurers but not others. But with hundreds of thousands of these letters going out and frightening people into thinking they have no choice but to sign up for a much more expensive plan, it's definitely something someone should look into. Like, say, giant news organizations with lots of money and resources.
Now, it should be said that when President Obama said during the debate over the Affordable Care Act in Congress that if you like your health coverage you can keep it, he was only half right. The reason he repeated it so many times was that he and his advisors firmly believed that one of the main reasons Bill Clinton's health-care reform failed was that it changed things too much for too many, and people fear change. In Clinton's plan, pretty much everybody not on Medicare or Medicaid would have had to go into a new insurance plan. That those plans might be better than what they had didn't matter; the idea frightened people. So the Obama administration took pains to emphasize that the government would not require anyone to change their insurance. That didn't mean they were guaranteeing that no insurance company would ever make changes to anyone's plan, because insurance companies do that all the time. But the law wouldn't mandate that, say, you leave Aetna and join Blue Cross.
- more -
http://prospect.org/article/time-investigate-those-insurance-company-letters
Think Progress debunked NBC's report on insurance cancellations, and there is more
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10023942430
5 replies
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= new reply since forum marked as read
ACA is a boon to Insurance companies and second only to having no regulation at all.
It enlarges the customer base by millions of new policy holders.
The subsidies are really price supports. The money does not go to policy holders, it goes directly to the Company.
The sound and fury we are seeing is a smoke screen.
They are making it as messy as possible so that the people will not see the forest for the trees: that the ACA is a huge compromise to the entrenched health care industry in return for some 'reforms' that are better described as basic fairness.
In battling ACA to the hilt, the companies are saying "You're damn lucky to get this much." and that would be true.
It enlarges the customer base by millions of new policy holders.
The subsidies are really price supports. The money does not go to policy holders, it goes directly to the Company.
The sound and fury we are seeing is a smoke screen.
They are making it as messy as possible so that the people will not see the forest for the trees: that the ACA is a huge compromise to the entrenched health care industry in return for some 'reforms' that are better described as basic fairness.
In battling ACA to the hilt, the companies are saying "You're damn lucky to get this much." and that would be true.
...regulations, including the new MLR and rate review. Insurers are also charged a fee for participating in the exchanges and they can be dropped if they don't comply with the rules.
Want to sell insurance on the Obamacare exchanges? There’s a (3.5%) fee for that.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2012/11/30/want-to-sell-insurance-on-the-obamacare-exchanges-theres-a-3-5-fee-for-that/
This is likely why insurance companies are still trying to scare poeple, doing everything to deter people using the exchanges: http://www.democraticunderground.com/10023949034
Insurers Aren’t Just Giving Out Rebate Checks Because Of Obamacare — They’re Lowering Premiums, Too
By Sy Mukherjee
Americans who bought individual health plans in 2012 saved $2.1 billion thanks to Obamacare consumer protections that limit how much insurers can profit off of Americans’ premiums, according to a new study by the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF). The vast majority of those savings stem from individual health plan providers lowering the premiums they charge Americans in an effort to comply with the reform law.
The Kaiser study comes shortly after several major California insurers announced that they would have to pay back $36 million to small businesses and their employees after charging them too much. Obamacare mandates that insurers on the individual market spend at least 80 percent of the premiums they charge on actual medical services, or reimburse the amount they overspent to their customers.
But insurers can avoid writing those checks after-the-fact if they just lower their premiums to begin with — and KFF’s study concludes that’s what many individual plan providers have been doing. KFF estimates that individual market insurers lowered their premiums by $856 million in 2011 and by $1.9 billion in 2012 to comply with the so-called “80/20 rule”:
The combination of these premium savings and rebate checks meant that Americans who bought their own insurance spent 7.5 percent less on their coverage in 2012 than they would have without Obamacare’s consumer protections.
- more -
http://thinkprogress.org/health/2013/06/07/2121051/insurers-rebate-checks-premiums-obamacare/
By Sy Mukherjee
Americans who bought individual health plans in 2012 saved $2.1 billion thanks to Obamacare consumer protections that limit how much insurers can profit off of Americans’ premiums, according to a new study by the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF). The vast majority of those savings stem from individual health plan providers lowering the premiums they charge Americans in an effort to comply with the reform law.
The Kaiser study comes shortly after several major California insurers announced that they would have to pay back $36 million to small businesses and their employees after charging them too much. Obamacare mandates that insurers on the individual market spend at least 80 percent of the premiums they charge on actual medical services, or reimburse the amount they overspent to their customers.
But insurers can avoid writing those checks after-the-fact if they just lower their premiums to begin with — and KFF’s study concludes that’s what many individual plan providers have been doing. KFF estimates that individual market insurers lowered their premiums by $856 million in 2011 and by $1.9 billion in 2012 to comply with the so-called “80/20 rule”:
The combination of these premium savings and rebate checks meant that Americans who bought their own insurance spent 7.5 percent less on their coverage in 2012 than they would have without Obamacare’s consumer protections.
- more -
http://thinkprogress.org/health/2013/06/07/2121051/insurers-rebate-checks-premiums-obamacare/
