Guaranteed Healthcare

By Donna Smith

CHICAGO – If you think the companies that collect your health insurance premiums and pay your health care claims have been insulated from the economic crisis, think again.  And if you think the health insurance industry that is suffering right alongside the financial services industry isn’t going to need a bail-out too, think yet again.  Only the bail-out we will give the health insurance industry will be much more insidious and potentially far more dangerous to us all.

I wanted to inform myself about the stock performance of the big boys in the for-profit health insurance market, and here’s what I found this morning on Business Week’s website:

Stock performance, over the past month:

Aetna --  down 25.03%

CIGNA – down 23.15 %

Wellpoint – down 20.59%

In fact, I couldn’t find one health insurance company traded on the stock exchange that looked very healthy right now. 

On its own, that’s not an indictment of the health insurance industry because so many businesses – if not most businesses – are losing money on Wall Street right now.

While the financial services industries were the first to the trough for bail-out, they won’t be the only private interests standing in line for some of our taxpayers’ funds.  But when the private, for-profit health insurance industry comes calling, it will do so by raising premiums, denying claims and seeking to cover more Americans who won’t actually need to use many medical services.  There are limited ways for the health insurance giants to recoup losses, and we are the way – our money, our ability to get the care we need and our lives depend on getting healthcare out of this folly.

We all know it.  Healthcare isn’t like widgets or tires or hammers and nails.  Healthcare is a human right.  When we are sick, when our neighbor is sick, when our parent is sick, when our child is sick, and yes – even when our enemies are sick – we must have access to medical care. To see a doctor or other healthcare professional when we need it (and before it has become a crisis) is the way a humane and just society behaves. 

But under the current, market sensitive and market driven pressures, healthcare morphs into a sort of odd blend of wealth-care for those who can still afford it as approved by for-profit insurance companies with enough resources to pay the claims.  We can argue all we want to about the art of medicine, but when Unitedhealth Group drops nearly 30 percent in value in just one month, there isn’t any art to what they’ll be doing to the practice of medicine.

As a patient, I do not want my healthcare subject to the whims and the momentary fortunes of the stock market.  I do not want to gamble on my healthcare or my children’s or my grandchildren’s.  And I certainly don’t think the CEOs of those big corporations will want to take reductions in compensation or allow shareholders to suffer.  Ronald Williams at Aetna, Edward Hanway at Cigna, Michael McCallister at Humana and Stephen Hemsley at Unitedhealth Group surely want to retain their millions in compensation even if that means denying me my prescription or my treatment or raising my premiums.

Any corporate losses resulting from the massive drops in value to the private health insurance industry in the current stock market environment will be absorbed by policy holders.  You and me.  Our employers.  Our neighbors.  Our families.  Our health is in the hands of the stock market not those of our doctors and other healthcare professionals. And right now, my healthcare is worth a lot less than it was on Labor Day.

The only alternative to gambling with our healthcare in this volatile way is to make sure public funding backs up the healthcare system. 

And I don’t know about other taxpayers – but I suspect many will feel as I do – I don’t want the funds I earn and the funds my taxes put in the public coffers to be used to pay for yet another corporate bail-out at my expense.  I’ll gladly pay for my healthcare through a public fund but not their wealthcare.  How does the saying go?  Been there. Done that.

I do not want to pay monthly premiums and on top of those premiums to fund a bail-out to shore up health insurance company CEO compensation or shareholder dividends.  And I cannot invest in the stock market by paying my health insurance premiums on time and wait for the market recovery in the estimated five to 10 years to recoup the investment.  I might get sick and need actual healthcare.

I want the funds I contribute to healthcare to be used for healthcare.  Period.