Blue Cross Out At
Kelsey-Seybold: Another One Bites The Dust
By
Leonard Zwelling
On Friday morning, July 29, The Chronicle’s front page announced that over 100,000 Blue Cross and
Blue Shield of Texas insured people would lose access to Kelsey-Seybold
doctors. This is attributable in part to the lack of profit derived from those
gaining access to insurance through the ObamaCare exchanges. (That’s called the
MLR or medical loss ratio. It’s the amount of money the insurers have to pay
out to actually care for the sick people they cover. They want to keep it as
low as possible and it obviously got too high.)
This problem was also identified in an editorial in the Chronicle on August 2 which noted the
marked increase in premiums requested by Blue Cross and Blue Shield. This is
estimated to affect 600,000 policyholders. As Jerome Greener notes in the
editorial, this is the inevitable consequence of ObamaCare and its demand to
include everyone in the insurance pool without real risk adjustments at the
premium level. (There are risk adjustments and risk corridors and reinsurance
that redistribute dollars from the more to the less profitable insurers, but
not real rating based on the likelihood of needing coverage).
http://www.houstonchronicle.com/opinion/outlook/article/Greener-Premium-hikes-under-Obamacare-9003177.php
In
general, premiums throughout the country are on the rise because if the
insurers are not permitted to rate the risk of needing coverage of the insured
to determine their premiums, then they will either raise everyone’s premiums or
drop the coverage completely. The latter is starting to occur. The former
already has.
This was totally predictable when one remembers that
“everyone’s definition of health care reform is the same—I pay less,” a quote
from American Enterprise Institute scholar Norman Ornstein.
As much as Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton talk about access to
affordable, quality health care as a right, it is still a privilege in the
United States. Get a good job or have enough money and you can be insured. Be
poor or ineligible for insurance (e.g., ineligible for ObamaCare because you
are not a legal American) and you are out of luck.
This is no health care system and no one should pretend that
it is.
This only bothers me because it appears as if getting this
right is no longer a part of the national debate. Congress is unlikely to
revisit health care reform unless Mrs. Clinton wins and she sweeps in a
Democratic Congress with her, very unlikely in the hopelessly gerrymandered
House of Representatives. Health care reform was a mere blip on the agenda of
either convention and it is not the major concern of most Americans. That’s
unfortunate because that means raw capitalism will be in play in the health
care-industrial complex and patients and doctors are likely to be the big
losers to large insurers, big pharma and large hospital chains. Heck, Anthem
wants to merge with Cigna and Aetna with Humana leaving the country three major
insurers (United would be the third). The government is moving to block the
mergers as anti-competitive. We will see.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/anthem-getting-past-cigna-merger-blues-1469638558
In your comings and goings and discussions about how
dictator Trump, aka The Fearless Leader, might govern, keep in mind this
problem has not improved much under Obama despite what the current President or
his Democratic aspirant might say. Health care is still a mess in America and
getting worse. The best and the brightest of our young people are avoiding
careers in medicine as their medical elders retire early and advise the young
to take a different career path than they did. Caring, discovery and integrity
are going the way of the dodo bird in medicine on Holcombe and elsewhere. Just
like politics, if someone does not squeeze the money out of the system as the
major fuel for the delivery of health care, this will only get worse.
Six years in, it is time for an honest assessment of
ObamaCare and another pass at real reform. If ObamaCare is a good model, and I
doubt that, let’s expand it. If Medicare is the best idea, let’s grow it. Or
better yet, let’s start with a clean sheet of paper and decide what we want access
to our health care system to be, a right or a privilege. Then let’s design a
uniquely American answer to the question that has been successfully faced in
every other organized democracy on Earth. What is our health care system to
be—a system or a mess?
