Is Health Reform Responsible For Rate Hikes?
Health Insurance Rate Hikes
Well, considering that health insurance companies seemed to have plenty of other reasons to raise rates in the past, we have to regard this justification with a critical eye. Kathleen Sebelius, a top Obama administration official and directory of the US Health and Human Services department, has warned the insurers NOT to justify rate hikes by blaming health reform.
What Are The New Mandated Health Reform Benefits
New mandated benefits include allowing grown children to remain on family policies until age 26, eliminating lifetime coverage benefits, and preventing insurers from terminating policies in the middle of coverage periods unless there is outright fraud. The administration says these new benefits may increase rates by one to two percent. However, insurers have been justifying much larger increases on these new mandated benefits.
Health Care for America Now, a group which supports the new reform bill, criticized the health insurance companies. They used industry history as evidence that its latest claims were misleading. For instance, WellPoint’s Anthem subsidiary had to reduce its proposed rate hike in California earlier this year after it tried to justify increases as high as thirty-nine percent with erroneous numbers.
Which Insurers Want a Rate Hike?
These changes will probably affect individual policies (about 9% of people with health insurance) and small business policies the most. Larger group polices from large employers are not expected to be affected. But that said, many of the largest US health insurance providers have asked for rate increases with health reform as a justification.
A lot of major insurers are involved. We would like to direct you to HealthReform.govfor some prime examples. Wellpoint, Blue Cross, and Aetna are some big players who have been getting slapped for making these claims.
On another note, Sebelius warned a major industry group that insurers who do implement unjustified rate hikes could be excluded from the new health insurance exchanges which are scheduled to be implemented in 2014.
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