Guaranteed Healthcare

The Los Angeles Times reports this morning that one of the nation's largest health insurers paid bonuses to its employees for kicking sick people off the health insurance rolls, including approving chemo therapy for a 51 year-old woman, then cancelling her policy immediately afterward.

The revelation that the health plan had cancellation goals and bonuses comes amid a storm of controversy over the industry-wide but long-hidden practice of rescinding coverage after expensive medical treatments have been authorized.

And these are the people that Mitt Romney, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Clinton/Edwards/Obama see as the answer to our healthcare crisis?

In this case…

Bates, who filed the suit against Health Net, owns a hair salon in a Gardena mini-mall between a liquor store and a doughnut shop. She said she was left with nearly $200,000 in medical bills and stranded in the midst of chemotherapy when Health Net canceled her coverage in January 2004.

Bates, 51, said the first notice she had that something was awry with her coverage came while she was in the hospital preparing for lump-removal surgery.

She said an administrator came to her room and told her the surgery, scheduled for early the next day, had been canceled because the hospital learned she had insurance problems. Health Net allowed the surgery to go forward only after Bates' daughter authorized the insurance company to charge three months of premiums in advance to her debit card, Bates alleged. Her coverage was canceled after she began post-surgical chemotherapy threatments.

Look, this is cruel..but it is exactly typical of the way health insurance companies operate.  They profit by denying care, a perverse disincentive that his destroying our healthcare system.  The solution that is in vogue everywhere from Massachusetts to California to the presidential campaign trail--forcing every to purchase expensive, wasteful, for-profit insurance products--would only perpetuate that system, and deepen our healthcare crisis.

HealthNet is not just “some” insurance company by the way—it is right at the heart of the emerging California plan between Arnold Schwarzenegger and Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez to ship billions of dollars of public subsidies to the insurance corporations. 

HealthNet’s chief operating officer is Pat Clarey, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s former chief of staff.  Arnold’s top adviser, Susan Kennedy, was the former VP of Governmental Affairs for HealthNet.  In other words, they have played an instrumental and intimate role in crafting the fake healthcare reform that is being debated in the Capitol today. 

What does this influence buy?  Under the California proposal a family making $62,000 would be required to spend $12,000 on insurance premiums alone, before co-pays, deductibles or denied care.  If they don't, their wages will be seized.  That’s reform?

As the Los Angeles Business Journal put it in May, 2006:

When Health Net of California hired Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's former chief of staff last month, the move underscored the close relationship between the state and managed care--and the big opportunities for insurer growth in the state.

The insiders looking to make California a forced market for health insurers should read Paul Krugman in today’s NY Times.  He writes:

The United States spends far more on health care per person than any other nation. Yet we have lower life expectancy than most other rich countries. Furthermore, every other advanced country provides all its citizens with health insurance; only in America is a large fraction of the population uninsured or underinsured.  You might think that these facts would make the case for major reform of America’s health care system — reform that would involve, among other things, learning from other countries’ experience — irrefutable. Instead, however, apologists for the status quo offer a barrage of excuses for our system’s miserable performance.

So I thought it would be useful to offer a catalog of the most commonly heard apologies for American health care, and the reasons they won’t wash.