In an interesting test case for future federal insurance regulatory powers, on Thursday Massachusetts denied almost 86% of proposed health insurance rate hikes for 2010. That’s 235 of 274 hikes averted, worth $6-8 million a month, if anyone’s counting.
By now most of us have heard the hullaballoo about California’s Anthem Blue Cross raising its individual plan rates by 39% or more. But this isn’t an isolated incident. Many insurers, including Health Net, Aetna, and Cigna, have jacked up their rates for 2010 due to a rapid increase in healthcare costs or other purported excuses. It may be surprising information to healthcare reform ostriches, but to those of tuned in to the accelerating US healthcare disaster, it’s old news. More interesting are the responses coming from Washington, D.C. and state politicians.
For the past few days we’ve been bombarded with the news that Massachusetts painted itself red on Tuesday. Equally unavoidable were the countless interpretations of what it all means. Yes, Democrats lost their super-majority, but why? Perhaps the most ironic explanation was victor Scott Brown’s. In a strange twist of an argument we’ve mainly been hearing from uneducated Tea Partiers, he said Massachusetts voters have theirs, and for the rest of the country to go get its own. Fascinating.
Not to belabor the issue, but the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, an excellent source of health policy analysis, has pubished a Health Affairs policy brief addressing the individual mandate. As you know, I’m not enthusiastically for a mandate under current “reform-lite” conditions. But long-term it will save us additional pain as private insurers would continue to use us as scapegoats for high costs if there wasn’t a mandate already.
Remember Massachusetts’ groundbreaking universal healthcare mandate, and its accompanying lessons learned? We previously talked about the irony of national healthcare reform efforts mirroring MA. After all, MA took our ‘uniquely American healthcare solution’ of private insurance coverage with a public safety net, expanded it to its entire population without actually fixing anything that was broken, and now finds itself drowning in escalating costs. THAT’S the strategy our vaunted lawmakers pursued in their roundabout political games and ‘compromises’? Yup.
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