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here's the facts:
Health care reform languishes in Congress, with no clear sign it will ever pass.
Meanwhile, most of us struggle to pay our weekly premiums and out-of-pocket expenses — that is, if we’re lucky enough to have employers who are trying to do the right thing by offering health insurance to their workers. We have no doubt that our employers are struggling, too, to pay their share of the insurance premiums.
In Maine, almost 280,000 people — according to Families USA’s March 2009 report — are uninsured. Nationwide, the number of uninsured is pegged at 46 million.
Clearly, there’s a need to reform a health-care system in which so many people can’t afford insurance coverage — a system in which those who do have coverage, increasingly, find they too are barely able to afford what they’re getting as well.
The flip-side, of course, is that health insurance companies are seeking another round of double-digit rate increases.
Perhaps the most blatant example — one that suggests an incredibly tone-deaf political understanding on the part of top-level insurance executives ... or arrogance ... or maybe both — is Anthem Blue Cross’s announcement earlier this month that it would be seeking premium increases up to 39 percent for an estimated 800,000 customers in California with individual health insurance policies. This came on the heels of Anthem’s parent company, WellPoint Inc., the nation’s largest health insurer by membership, reporting yearly earnings of $4.7 billion in 2009. That was nearly double the previous year’s profit of $2.5 billion.
Anthem’s California rate increases have triggered an investigation in Congress, with a hearing scheduled for Feb. 24.
Here in Maine, House Speaker Hannah Pingree, Senate President Elizabeth Mitchell and the co-chairs of the Legislature’s Insurance and Financial Services Committee, have written a letter asking that the investigation be broadened to include Anthem’s practices in states like Maine as well.
Their letter cites Anthem’s pending rate hike request of 22.9 percent in 2010 and its 18.1 percent request in 2009 (which was denied by Maine’s Insurance Superintendent Mila Koffman, who approved a 10.9 percent hike instead, triggering a lawsuit by Anthem against the state of Maine).
“Insurance companies cannot continue to enjoy record profits while more and more Americans lose their health insurance,” Mitchell said. “It is time that Anthem and other private insurers explain to the public why they continue to escalate their profits at a time when millions of people cannot afford coverage.”
Is it any wonder that a Washington Post/ABC News poll released last week found two-thirds of Americans want to see Democrats and Republicans working to pass comprehensive health-care reform? That poll showed big support for key elements of the legislation, with 80 percent backing a ban on insurance company limits on people with pre-existing health conditions and 72 percent favoring employers being obliged to pay for health insurance.
double digit price increases the last 3 years -record profits -and people dying because of the nut cases like rush and Ray -the greed of the right-and the fools that let them rob us blind!
and of course we must include the heritage foundation that free loads while pushing a right wing political agenda- I mean they can't afford to pay their share but they can hold their meetings in the best class "a" restraunts in the country!(these meetings include defeating healthcare reform)
who do you think is supporting them? the working man or the well to do!
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