Brown/Karnas: The promise of health insurance rate review in Arizona
Diane E. Brown / Fred Karnas
Diane E. Brown is the executive director of the Arizona PIRG Education Fund. Fred Karnas is the president and CEO for St. Luke’s Health Initiatives. .
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7 comments:
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Arizona Willie posted at 4:52 pm on Wed, Apr 18, 2012.
VofReason ... buying medical insurance is NOTHING like taking out a mortgage you can't afford or racking up credit card debt --- NOTHING.
You can live quite well without buying a home. Overspending is a stupid thing to do done by ( usually ) stupid or desperate people.
Not being able to understand all the legal beagle language in insurance policies that even skilled lawyers fight over in court is a completely different issue.
The insurance company CEO'S all belong to the same Country Clubs and went to the same colleges and belong to the same Fraternities and play golf together and fix prices on a daily basis -- and there is no watchdog to prevent it.
They all agree to cancel subscribers when disasters strikes in order to S*R*E*W the subscribers out of their money.
They all agree to refuse to insure people with pre-existing conditions.
They stick together because once some company breaks ranks they all will have to change and that would cut into profits which would cut into bonuses.
Can't have that.
Insurance policies are all written in Klingon and no rational human can make sense of them. The insurance companies have entire buildings full of lawyers who do NOTHING but figure how to write the fine print so the company can avoid living up to the promises they made when you signed up.
Next door to that building they have another building full of different lawyers who do NOTHING but delay your court case when you ( or a class action ) sues them for reneging on their agreements. If you ever finally get them in court you wind up facing a phalanx of lawyers who have made their entire careers doing nothing but fighting cases just like you are presenting -- and winning because the language used in the policies makes even the judges head spin.
Not to mention the judge has a pending claim and went to college with some of the lawyer on the defense team.
Can you tell I'm a fan of insurance companies?
I thought you could.
VofReason posted at 12:26 pm on Wed, Apr 18, 2012.
AZ Willie may be right. It is alot like the poor people who were hoodwinked into signing up for the Mortgages that they knew they couldn't afford. Or like the innocent people that get wrapped into a Credit Card and spend far beyond their means and get into trouble. The Government should step in and make sure people don't make bad decisions. I bet if this idea gathers some steam and gets up to the fed, we will just send all of our paychecks away to taxes. They will take some off the top for waste and then give us back exactly what they think we need.
chatmandu002 posted at 11:02 am on Wed, Apr 18, 2012.
No more big government interference or control. Let the free market set the price of insurance. The only thing the government should do is set the stage for competition by establishing a location for information about health insurance services and prices. If the consumer is not willing to learn then "buyer beware".
Louiejr posted at 9:40 am on Wed, Apr 18, 2012.
Insurance companies are in business to make a profit ! When their business is no longer profitable they will cease selling their product . The only way to get their profit margin lower is competition . When you drive by a skyscaper with a health insurance provider's name on it in large letters , you know where a large portion of the profits went and .... now it is overhead .
Unfortunately when their is no watchdog on healthcare pricing the Gmen will step in . This is not always the best practice because it just creates another government agency and more federal debt .
Correcting these price practices takes a long time because there are lots of high paid lobbyists for the healthcare industry .
The reason healthcare costs are such a hot topic is because the Gmen can't afford
to keep the promises they made any longer .
samkat posted at 5:33 pm on Tue, Apr 17, 2012.
Another major issue is the lack of interest on the part of our flat earth conservative legislators who are too busy stuffing their pockets with legal graft when they aren't trying to pass more laws regulating our morality and bedroom activities.
Heck, they can't even be bothered with regulating themselves with decent ethics regulations. How can we possibly expect them to protect us from the bad guys?
Arizona Willie posted at 2:14 pm on Tue, Apr 17, 2012.
No no no no VofReason. The normal average person doesn't have the time or ability to wade through an insurance policy and all the fine print.
Go home after a days work, have supper, then sit down and try to read ( and understand ) your way through a health insurance policy.
Unless you are a super genious or work as an insurance company lawyer it will make your eyes cross and put you to sleep before you get through 10 pages.
Government has a legitimate role in protecting the people -- I believe it says " from all enemies both foreign and domestic ". Insurance companies that rip people off are a domestic enemy -- economic terrorists. People pay their premiums for years and then when illness strikes their insurance company cancels them. And the don't return all the premiums either.
We HAVE TO HAVE a government agency with specialists in insurance lingo to go through all the *rap put out by the insurance companies and figure out what is really going on.
The government HAS to protect the people from PREDATORY insurance companies.
Protecting the people is what government is for.
VofReason posted at 1:01 pm on Tue, Apr 17, 2012.
Or just make insurance available for competition and sale acrossed state lines. Let the market set the standard. People will figure it out pretty quickly and the market will become the arbitor of best practices. No new Government involvement needed.