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Health care reform. A topic that should be discussed with quiet rationality because of its importance to all has engendered a stream of invective from a few while the many look for solid evidence upon which to take a position. Vested interests—the insurance industry, the pharmaceutical industry, and the health care industry—spread lies to protect their profits while people suffer and die. The Mainstream media make no attempt to sift the truth from the chaff, the media more a tool of greedy corporations than a watchful Fourth Estate. Many members of Congress take money from the health care industry and write convoluted bills that protect those interests rather than protect the good of the public. In informational meetings, a few shout down the majority, drowning out any possibility of reasoned analysis based on facts. And Thomas Jefferson’s belief that reason would defeat error is never given a chance, thus subverting our very democracy. And how, amidst the noise and the lies, is the average citizen to figure out the truth?
Perhaps the place to start is to clarify the difference between socialized medicine—such as Sweden has—and a government-run insurance program—such as proposed in HR 676, which is single-payer, public funded, non-profit, privately delivered health care, very much like Medicare. The differences between socialized medicine and a public funded insurance program are considerable. Socialized medicine involves the government running the entire medical establishment, from the hospitals and clinics right down to paying doctors, nurses, and everyone else involved in health care delivery. All facets of the system are decided at the government level. I have a friend in Russia who lives under such a system, and it’s not one I would recommend given what she has told me about it. No one—not the president, not the Congress, not a variety of organizations advocating health care reform—is suggesting we move to socialized medicine.
Unfortunately, forces on the right, led by some vocal Republican members of Congress are doing quite a good job at convincing many Americans that socialized medicine is the goal of this reform movement. This rampant fear mongering contributes nothing of value to the discussion and only makes it more difficult to find a solution to the problem presented by a broken health care system. It seems that when the right can’t address an issue based on factual evidence, they scream lies as loudly as possible to obscure their lack of substance. And in this case, never debate the merits of a single-payer plan. As the Republican high commissioner of propaganda Frank Lunz said early on, fear would be the instrument used to defeat health care reform.
What is actually being advocated by many people both inside and outside the health care industry is a government run health insurance program—a single-payer, public plan. The vested interests that roll in massive profits derived from sickness don’t want such a plan, even though such plans have already been hugely successful in this country, Medicare being a shinning example, along with TRICARE, the program for 9.2 million military active-duty personnel and retirees. One of the ironies in the right’s attack on reform is that some recipients of Medicare scream against reform because they “don’t want government meddling with their health care”—so confused by the lies from the vested interests that they don’t even know their Medicare program is government run, and run quite efficiently and effectively.
Why is Big Health Care fighting change? One word: greed. Health care industries make huge profits off sickness in this country, though in a rather perverse way. The insurance industry does all it can not to insure those who are or might become sick, wanting only to take premiums from the healthy, those not likely to call on their insurance for help. And woe unto the small business where an employee needs extensive, expensive medical treatment. The carrier of that business’s health insurance will make it impossible for the business to afford continued coverage. That’s according to industry insider, Wendell Potter, former executive at CIGNA. As he points out, Big Insurance doesn’t care about people or their health. They care only about profits.
WHAT OUR PRESENT HEALTH CARE SYSTEM GIVES US
- As a nation, we spent $7,290 per person on health care in 2007. The rest of the industrialized world—our peers—spent $3,075 per person. That’s 42% of what we spent.
- We rank 37th in quality of health care, according to the World Health Organization.
- U.S. citizens’ satisfaction with their health care ranks 18th among 30 advanced democracies, according to a Gallup survey.
- The Kaiser Family Foundation reported that in 2006, only 5% of the population used almost 50% of all health care spending.
- Over 60% of recent bankruptcies were caused by health care expenses. Yet almost 70% of the people filing for bankruptcy had some sort of health insurance, according to the Harper’s Index.
- Currently, 14,000 Americans are losing their health coverage each day.
- According to a recent article by Chris Hedges, Senior Fellow at the Nation Institute, premiums paid to large US health-insurance companies have increased by 87% since 2002, while profits for the top ten insurance companies have increased by 428%. Those top ten companies took in $13 billion in 2007 and their CEO’s averaged $12 million in salaries according to Health Care for America Now.
- Approximately 30 cents of every health care dollar goes for paperwork in the private insurance bureaucracy, not health care.
- Approximately 1.5 million families lose their homes each year because of medical bills they can’t pay.
- Insurance companies spend inordinate amounts of time and money denying claims in order to increase profits.
- The overall lifespan of the average American ranks 42 in the world.
- The last points in this section are particularly significant. One of the major fear-mongering arguments being made by Big Health Care—and mouthed by Republicans in Congress—is that if we go to a single-payer public plan, three things will happen: 1. we will endure long lines, 2. care will be rationed, and 3. people will die while waiting for treatment. This argument ignores present reality. First, when was the last time anyone went to a doctor’s office or emergency room and didn’t face long lines? So much for the lines argument. Second, the prestigious Institute of Medicine has released a landmark report stating that conservatively, under our present system, 22,000 Americans die each year because they lack health insurance. The actual number may be as high as 40,000. That’s one American dying every 24 minutes because our health care system has failed. Third, care is already rationed in a variety of ways, but one example is illustrative. According to the American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network, 1 in 4 cancer patients delay treatment because of cost, 1 in 3 cancer patients skip pills or other medications, 1 in 4 delay recommended screenings, and 1 in 5 didn’t fill a prescription, all because they lacked the financial resources.
WHAT REFORM COULD MEAN
One argument against reform, especially a public plan, is cost. An early estimate by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) was that such a plan would cost $1 trillion dollars over ten years and only cover a third of the uninsured. However, after taking into account more information, the CBO says a public plan that covered everyone would cost about $600 million for ten years. The revised figures have been absent from most mainstream media.
Another argument against a public plan is that it will kill competition, thus removing the insurance companies from the mix. The Urban Institute released a report (not surprisingly, hardly mentioned in the media) that makes a couple of important points on this issue. First, the insurance markets are not competitive. “…The markets are not providing the benefits one would expect from competition, including efficient operations and consequent control over health care costs.” A public plan would encourage competition, to the benefit of all citizens. The report also notes that insurance companies that responded to the competition would maintain significant market share. Of course, one reason competition has declined significantly in recent years is because of numerous consolidations, and there’s no doubt the industry likes less competition. More profit to be made.
Four excellent reasons for a public option that will help control costs—generally ignored in the mainstream media—follow:
- Because the government doesn’t have to engage in expensive advertising, less cost to the consumer.
- Up to 30% of current insurance costs will be eliminated because the government won’t take a profit.
- The government can leverage down exorbitant drug costs with its enormous buying power, even as the Veterans Administration does now.
- This will be an option. If you don’t want it, you can stick with a private company.
The respected Milken Institute estimates that we could save $1 trillion a year with better prevention, management, and treatment of chronic disease given a public plan that allowed people to go to doctors early and have regular checkups. This is almost a no-brainer. Addressing medical issues before they become serious problems is always less expensive than waiting until problems fester into major health issues.
A study by the Institute for Health and Socio-Economic Policy states that moving to a guaranteed health care system could create over 2.5 million new jobs and inject over $400 billion into the economy. Every dollar spent directly on health care also creates almost three additional dollars in the economy.
HOW PUBLIC PLANS IN THE U.S. HAVE WORKED SO FAR
Public plans based on a single-payer philosophy have been spectacularly successful in the U.S. Medicare is the prime example. Administrative costs are only two or three cents for each dollar spent. Multiple studies show that people on Medicare are quite satisfied. They have freedom of choice in terms of doctors and treatments, and paperwork is minimal. As Joshua Holland writes, “ Recipients of Medicare, Medicaid and the State Children’s Health Insurance Program are the beneficiaries of health care covered by the functional equivalent of a government-run, single-payer program, and most are quite satisfied.” A Rand Corp. study of TRICARE, the program for military retirees and active duty personnel, states that enrollees have the best health care in the nation.
Medicare gives members completely free choice of doctors, and if a person moves to a different state, the insurance goes along. Insurance companies on the other hand, have approved networks of doctors and services, and costs to the insured rise dramatically for going out of network. Both my parents are on Medicare, and the system is so much simpler than the insurance policy I have. At one point I had to leave my doctor because the insurance carrier where I worked was changed, and my doctor was not in the new carrier’s network.
Between 60% and 70% of both doctors and citizens want single-payer not-for-profit health care for everyone, according to Dr. Marsha Angell of the Harvard Medical School. Dr. Ralph de la Torre, a current hospital CEO and former heart surgeon, wrote an open letter to President Obama in which he said, “We can’t simply tweak elements of the system while leaving the rest intact. It’s time to overhaul the entire model.”
Dr. Torre’s words are echoed by Dr. Angell, who points out that it makes no sense to pour more money into a dysfunctional system that is hemoraging money while quality of care is declining. We need to treat the cause, the health care system itself, in order to actually improve the quality of health care in this country. Dr. Sidney Wolfe of Johns Hopkins says we could save $4 trillion dollars over 10 years if we eliminated the insurance industry. He notes that in the past thirty years, the number of doctors and nurses in this country have increased two or three fold, about right for the expanding population. But the number of health administrators has increased thirty times in that same period. Among these hoards are the people working assiduously to deny health care to the insured in order to increase profits for the company.
Want a quick view of the many benefits of a single-payer plan that’s been a huge success for over thirty years? Take a look at http://www.alternet.org/story/140918/ to see what we’ve been missing and how so many of our lives might have been changed for the better had we been under a single-payer plan.
WHY MEANINGFUL REFORM MAY NOT HAPPEN
The reasons why reform may not happen are greed and lobbyists. I can hardly do better than quote Chris Hedges at this point. “The lobbyists have…hijacked legislation in order to fleece the citizen. The five largest private health insurers and their trade group, America’s Health Insurance Plans, spent more than $6 million on lobbying in the first quarter of 2009. Pfizer, the world’s biggest drug maker, spent more than $9 million during the last quarter of 2008 and the first three months of this year. The Washington Post reported that up to 30 members of Congress from both parties who hold key committee memberships have major investments in health care companies totaling between $11 million and $27 million. President Barack Obama’s director of health care policy, who will not discuss single-payer as an option, has served on the boards of several health care corporations.”
Bill Moyers reports that the health care industry spent $500 million on lobbying activities in 2008.
In terms of influence buying, Robert Perry points to Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), the ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, which has enormous influence over what kind of health care reform bill will be produced. “…Since 2005, Grassley’s various political action committees have collected nearly $1.3 million in donations from the industries related to the health insurance debated according to OpenSecrets.org. Grassley’s top four donor groups were Health ($411,956); Insurance ($307,348); Pharmaceuticals ($233,850); and Hospitals ($197,137). Eighth on Grassley’s donor list were HMOs at $130,684.”
But the king in terms of collecting money from the health care industry is Democrat Max Baucus, who heads the Senate Finance Committee, the committee that will ultimately decide if we have real reform or not. Senator Baucus received more money from the health care industry than any other Democrat, and he ranks number three in the Senate overall. He refuses to even discuss a single-payer plan, and when the health industry sent lobbyists to his office, two were the senator’s former chiefs of staff. Certainly no conflict of interest there.
The Center for Responsive Politics, a non-partisan group, says that vested health care interests have spent more than $134 million on lobbying in just the first quarter of 2009. Bill Moyers and Michael Winship report that “The Washington Post’s health care reform blog reported…that Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina has hired an outside PR firm to put together a video campaign assaulting Obama’s public plan. And this month alone (May, 2009), the group Conservatives for Patients’ Rights is spending more than a million dollars for attack ads. They’ve hired a public relations firm called CRC—Creative Response Concepts. You remember them—the same high-minded folks who brought you the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, the gang who savaged John Kerry’s service record in Vietnam.”
As for lobbyists, the health care industry has hired 350 former members of Congress or congressional staffers, people who have connections to virtually every office on the Hill, to make sure that nothing changes. Change is bad for profits.
With the kind of money and influence the lobbyists have in Congress, HR 676 (a single-payer plan) has disappeared, and current proposals will continue the profits of the health care industry, even as more and more Americans suffer. At best, we’ll get something like the failed Massachusetts model.
A deeper question is whether our representatives in Congress should represent our best interests or those of a greedy industry? In a personal aside, when I wrote Alan D. Mollohan, my Democratic congressman, asking why he wouldn’t support HR 676 along with 80 other members, he refused to answer my letter. When I called his office, I was told the aide handling health care would return my call. Not surprisingly, no call ever came. But then, I don’t hand out millions of dollars to campaign coffers. And neither Senator Rockefeller nor Senator Byrd have come out strongly for a single-payer plan.
CONCLUSION
Frederick Douglas said, “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and never will.” The health care industry has immense power and gobs of money. They may well be the most powerful lobby on the Hill. Members of Congress for the most part seems paralyzed before that power, unable to put aside their selfish desires for reelection for the good of the country and the citizens they were elected to represent. President Obama has been a great disappointment, unwilling to stand up for what he believes—or, at least, for what he indicated he believed prior to being elected.
If we are going to wrench meaningful health care reform from a spineless Congress and President, we are going to have to do it ourselves, each of us, through our letters, our telephone calls, our emails and faxes, our insistence that our representatives actually represent our wishes. Doctors and nurses have been marching in Washington (note how the media has ignored this) and taking part in acts of civil disobedience in an effort to get Congress to discuss real reform. As one nurse said, “This is a human rights struggle” for which she and others have willingly gone to jail.
We should keep the words of FDR in mind. “I agree with you, I want to do it, now make me do it.” Let’s make the president and the Congress do it. If we don’t, we’ll see the health care system continue to crumble as a few make obscene profits at the expense of the many. And as many have pointed out, continuing the present system is a formula for bankruptcy for both individuals and the country.
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Inaction cost, $9trillion over the next decade, can not be compared to the balance between estimate and outcome in a worst case of scenario, and this balance could be adjusted each year. ((Some of CBO analysis : While the costs of the financial bailouts and economic stimulus bills are staggering, they are only a fraction of the coming costs from Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Over the next decade, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projects that each year Medicaid will expand by 7 percent, Medicare by 6 percent, and Social Security by 5 percent. These programs face a 75-year shortfall of $43 trillion--60 times greater than the gross cost of the $700 billion TARP financial bailout)). Time does not fix endless greed and energy depletion.
When the public health is also one of commodity like a house, we come to a tragic and unthinkable conclusion : As to for-profit business, the more and longer ills patients get, the more profits they make, and it will debilitate the overall economy involving education for the future, not to mention continued bankruptcy of middle class.
Of young adults ages 19 to 29, 13.2 million, or 29 percent, lacked coverage in 2007, and that implies the total of this promising reform will be cheaper than expected, I guess.
In case of an unexpected injury or ill, they might give up their learning or aspiration, in this regard, this reform means liberty, job opportunity, competitiveness for them and future.
When some part of our body is ailing seriously, we are going to lose competitiveness, equally, when some part of a nation is ailing servery, it is going to loose competitiveness, too.
The Health care system needs reform not an overhaul. While we are at it what really needs reform is our federal government. There are some good ideas out there like this recent Healthcare Reform article. It brings up several good points including some addressed in the article. We really need government to focus on ways to cut cost through infrastructure and healthcare technology. Ideas like computer based records, online infrastructure etc. are what need development and an area where real savings can be realized fairly quickly.
One example: Aetna Individual Health Plans plans recently improved a system for everyone to check rates and apply for coverage online. This is a good start but government needs to provide the infrastructure for healthcare management technology i.e. documents, test results, records, and personal history available online and by anyone authorized. This is where we should start.
June 24, 2009
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Mr. Chairman, thank you for the opportunity to be here this afternoon. My name is Wendell Potter and for 20 years, I worked as a senior executive at health insurance companies, and I saw how they confuse their customers and dump the sick — all so they can satisfy their Wall Street investors.
I know from personal experience that members of Congress and the public have good reason to question the honesty and trustworthiness of the insurance industry. Insurers make promises they have no intention of keeping, they flout regulations designed to protect consumers, and they make it nearly impossible to understand — or even to obtain — information we need. As you hold hearings and discuss legislative proposals over the coming weeks, I encourage you to look very closely at the role for-profit insurance companies play in making our health care system both the most expensive and one of the most dysfunctional in the world. I hope you get a real sense of what life would be like for most of us if the kind of so-called reform the insurers are lobbying for is enacted.
When I left my job as head of corporate communications for one of the country's largest insurers, I did not intend to go public as a former insider. However, it recently became abundantly clear to me that the industry's charm offensive — which is the most visible part of duplicitous and well-financed PR and lobbying campaigns — may well shape reform in a way that benefits Wall Street far more than average Americans.
A few months after I joined the health insurer CIGNA Corp. in 1993, just as the last national health care reform debate was underway, the president of CIGNA's health care division was one of three industry executives who came here to assure members of Congress that they would help lawmakers pass meaningful reform. While they expressed concerns about some of President Clinton's proposals, they said they enthusiastically supported several specific goals.
Those goals included covering all Americans; eliminating underwriting practices like pre-existing condition exclusions and cherry-picking; the use of community rating; and the creation of a standard benefit plan. Had the industry followed through on its commitment to those goals, I wouldn't be here today.
Today we are hearing industry executives saying the same things and making the same assurances. This time, though, the industry is bigger, richer and stronger, and it has a much tighter grip on our health care system than ever before. In the 15 years since insurance companies killed the Clinton plan, the industry has consolidated to the point that it is now dominated by a cartel of large for-profit insurers.
The average family doesn't understand how Wall Street's dictates determine whether they will be offered coverage, whether they can keep it, and how much they'll be charged for it. But, in fact, Wall Street plays a powerful role. The top priority of for-profit companies is to drive up the value of their stock. Stocks fluctuate based on companies' quarterly reports, which are discussed every three months in conference calls with investors and analysts. On these calls, Wall Street investors and analysts look for two key figures: earnings per share and the medical-loss ratio, or medical "benefit ratio," as the industry now terms it. That is the ratio between what the company actually pays out in claims and what it has left over to cover sales, marketing, underwriting and other administrative expenses and, of course, profits.
To win the favor of powerful analysts, for-profit insurers must prove that they made more money during the previous quarter than a year earlier and that the portion of the premium going to medical costs is falling. Even very profitable companies can see sharp declines in stock prices moments after admitting they've failed to trim medical costs. I have seen an insurer's stock price fall 20 percent or more in a single day after executives disclosed that the company had to spend a slightly higher percentage of premiums on medical claims during the quarter than it did during a previous period. The smoking gun was the company's first-quarter medical loss ratio, which had increased from 77.9% to 79.4% a year later.
To help meet Wall Street's relentless profit expectations, insurers routinely dump policyholders who are less profitable or who get sick. Insurers have several ways to cull the sick from their rolls. One is policy rescission. They look carefully to see if a sick policyholder may have omitted a minor illness, a pre-existing condition, when applying for coverage, and then they use that as justification to cancel the policy, even if the enrollee has never missed a premium payment. Asked directly about this practice just last week in the House Energy and Commerce Committee, executives of three of the nation's largest health insurers refused to end the practice of cancelling policies for sick enrollees. Why? Because dumping a small number of enrollees can have a big effect on the bottom line. Ten percent of the population accounts for two-thirds of all health care spending. The Energy and Commerce Committee's investigation into three insurers found that they canceled the coverage of roughly 20,000 people in a five-year period, allowing the companies to avoid paying $300 million in claims.
They also dump small businesses whose employees' medical claims exceed what insurance underwriters expected. All it takes is one illness or accident among employees at a small business to prompt an insurance company to hike the next year's premiums so high that the employer has to cut benefits, shop for another carrier, or stop offering coverage altogether — leaving workers uninsured. The practice is known in the industry as "purging." The purging of less profitable accounts through intentionally unrealistic rate increases helps explain why the number of small businesses offering coverage to their employees has fallen from 61 percent to 38 percent since 1993, according to the National Small Business Association. Once an insurer purges a business, there are often no other viable choices in the health insurance market because of rampant industry consolidation.
An account purge so eye-popping that it caught the attention of reporters occurred in October 2006 when CIGNA notified the Entertainment Industry Group Insurance Trust that many of the Trust's members in California and New Jersey would have to pay more than some of them earned in a year if they wanted to continue their coverage. The rate increase CIGNA planned to implement, according to USA Today, would have meant that some family-plan premiums would exceed $44,000 a year. CIGNA gave the enrollees less than three months to pay the new premiums or go elsewhere.
Purging through pricing games is not limited to letting go of an isolated number of unprofitable accounts. It is endemic in the industry. For instance, between 1996 and 1999, Aetna initiated a series of company acquisitions and became the nation's largest health insurer with 21 million members. The company spent more than $20 million that it received in fees and premiums from customers to revamp its computer systems, enabling the company to "identify and dump unprofitable corporate accounts," as The Wall Street Journal reported in 2004. Armed with a stockpile of new information on policyholders, new management and a shift in strategy, in 2000, Aetna sharply raised premiums on less profitable accounts. Within a few years, Aetna lost 8 million covered lives due to strategic and other factors.
While strategically initiating these cost hikes, insurers have professed to be the victims of rising health costs while taking no responsibility for their share of America's health care affordability crisis. Yet, all the while, health-plan operating margins have increased as sick people are forced to scramble for insurance.
Unless required by state law, insurers often refuse to tell customers how much of their premiums are actually being paid out in claims. A Houston employer could not get that information until the Texas legislature passed a law a few years ago requiring insurers to disclose it. That Houston employer discovered that its insurer was demanding a 22 percent rate increase in 2006 even though it had paid out only 9 percent of the employer's premium dollars for care the year before.
It's little wonder that insurers try to hide information like that from its customers. Many people fall victim to these industry tactics, but the Houston employer might have known better — it was the Harris County Medical Society, the county doctors' association.
A study conducted last year by PricewaterhouseCoopers revealed just how successful the insurers' expense management and purging actions have been over the last decade in meeting Wall Street's expectations. The accounting firm found that the collective medical-loss ratios of the seven largest for-profit insurers fell from an average of 85.3 percent in 1998 to 81.6 percent in 2008. That translates into a difference of several billion dollars in favor of insurance company shareholders and executives and at the expense of health care providers and their patients.
There are many ways insurers keep their customers in the dark and purposely mislead them — especially now that insurers have started to aggressively market health plans that charge relatively low premiums for a new brand of policies that often offer only the illusion of comprehensive coverage.
An estimated 25 million Americans are now underinsured for two principle reasons. First, the high deductible plans many of them have been forced to accept — like I was forced to accept at CIGNA — require them to pay more out of their own pockets for medical care, whether they can afford it or not. The trend toward these high-deductible plans alarms many health care experts and state insurance commissioners. As California Lieutenant Governor John Garamendi told the Associated Press in 2005 when he was serving as the state's insurance commissioner, the movement toward consumer-driven coverage will eventually result in a "death spiral" for managed care plans. This will happen, he said, as consumer-driven plans "cherry-pick" the youngest, healthiest and richest customers while forcing managed care plans to charge more to cover the sickest patients. The result, he predicted, will be more uninsured people.
In selling consumer-driven plans, insurers often try to persuade employers to go "full replacement," which means forcing all of their employees out of their current plans and into a consumer-driven plan. At least two of the biggest insurers have done just that, to the dismay of many employees who would have preferred to stay in their HMOs and PPOs. Those options were abruptly taken away from them.
Secondly, the number of uninsured people has increased as more have fallen victim to deceptive marketing practices and bought what essentially is fake insurance. The industry is insistent on being able to retain so-called "benefit design flexibility" so they can continue to market these kinds of often worthless policies. The big insurers have spent millions acquiring companies that specialize in what they call "limited-benefit" plans. An example of such a plan is marketed by one of the big insurers under the name of Starbridge Select. Not only are the benefits extremely limited but the underwriting criteria established by the insurer essentially guarantee big profits. Pre-existing conditions are not covered during the first six months, and the employer must have an annual employee turnover rate of 70 percent or more, so most of the workers don't even stay on the payroll long enough to use their benefits. The average age of employees must not be higher than 40, and no more than 65 percent of the workforce can be female. Employers don't pay any of the premiums—the employees pay for everything. As Consumer Reports noted in May, many people who buy limited-benefit policies, which often provide little or no hospitalization, are misled by marketing materials and think they are buying more comprehensive care. In many cases it is not until they actually try to use the policies that they find out they will get little help from the insurer in paying the bills.
The lack of candor and transparency is not limited to sales and marketing. Notices that insurers are required to send to policyholders—those explanation-of-benefit documents that are supposed to explain how the insurance company calculated its payments to providers and how much is left for the policyholder to pay—are notoriously incomprehensible. Insurers know that policyholders are so baffled by those notices they usually just ignore them or throw them away. And that's exactly the point. If they were more understandable, more consumers might realize that they are being ripped off.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for beginning this conversation on transparency and for making this such a priority. S. 1050, your legislation to require insurance companies to be more honest and transparent in how they communicate with consumers, is essential. So, too, is S. 9 1278, the Consumers Choice Health Plan, which would create a strong public health insurance option as a benchmark in transparency and quality. Americans need and overwhelmingly support the option of obtaining coverage from a public plan. The industry and its backers are using fear tactics, as they did in 1994, to tar a transparent, publicly-accountable health care option as a "government-run system." But what we have today, Mr. Chairman, is a Wall Street-run system that has proven itself an untrustworthy partner to its customers, to the doctors and hospitals who deliver care, and to the state and federal governments that attempt to regulate it.