If we were to start anew, few of us middle-aged folks would qualify for health insurance under today’s industry practices.
Victims of a past back injury, an over-used wrist or an overactive thyroid would be tainted as having an “existing condition,” and thus made either ineligible for health insurance or forced to pay exhorbitant rates.
Health insurers haven’t been above trying to screen applicants whose health records point to possible illnesses.
One of the nation’s largest, WellPoint, re-cently admitted to trying to claim that women suffering from breast cancer had known of their condition before joining a WellPoint plan. The next step was to cancel their coverage.
The new health care reform law will make it illegal to deny anyone coverage because of a pre-existing illness. In-surers had claimed they could keep rates low only if their collective gene pools were clean.
Many of those with conditions such as type 1 diabetes have suffered from this discrimination their entire lives. Necessary injections of insulin and the requisite test strips average about $300 a month — some of that cost is covered by insurers, some not.
With the new legislation, children with pre-existing conditions will be eligible for coverage unconditionally beginning this fall.
Adults will have to wait until 2014 to receive the same benefit.
HEALTH INSURANCE premiums have risen steadily by 5-10 percent percent over the past 10 years, much faster than inflation or wages, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In Kansas, the average policy has increased 105 percent from 1999 to 2009. Ten years ago, the average family paid not quite $6,000 a year for coverage. Today, that’s escalated to $13,375.
There’s nothing in the recent health care legislation to prevent insurers from raising their rates.
Because of this sky’s-the-limit ability, the number of employers offering employees health insurance has dropped from almost 70 percent to 60 percent over 10 years. It had become too expensive a perk.
With the new legislation, it’s a Catch 22 for businesses. Now mandated by government to provide insurance or pay a penalty, employers need some assurance that it won’t bankrupt them. States need to come down hard on insurers and make them justify their rate increases. California did it to Anthem when it tried to raise rates by 39 percent earlier this year; Massachusetts has said no to 90 percent of requests by insurers since it enacted universal care.
The legislation has moved health care a long ways in putting our country on a more even keel, helping erase that line between the haves and the have-nots.
Now it’s time to work on making it a program we can afford.
— Susan Lynn
