Health care & profits

Shockwaves rippled through California when Anthem Blue Cross, the largest for-profit health insurance company in the state, announced increases in premiums of up to 39 percent. This would affect 800,000 individual policyholders.

Why the increase? To increase profitability! WellPoint, of which Anthem Blue Cross is a subsidiary, promised its shareholders higher earnings. Although the company claims it has to charge higher rates because it’s losing healthy clients and paying out more for sicker policyholders, it won’t disclose any information to validate this claim.

There has been such a loud uproar over the rate hike that state officials and the Obama administration have criticized it and are investigating the corporation’s action.

What angers policyholders and health care activists even more is that WellPoint earned record profits of $4.7 billion last year, twice what it garnered in 2008. It raked in $2.7 billion in profits in the last quarter of 2009 alone.

National Nurses United, the largest nurses’ union in the U.S., blasted Anthem Blue Cross and said the rate increase is “not out of character for an industry [that] engages systemically in price gouging and denial of care.” (www.nationalnurses

united.org)

Anthem Blue Cross is notorious for canceling policies of pregnant women and chronically ill people. The NNU says the company denied 27 percent of claims in the first nine months of 2009.

WellPoint, the largest insurer in the U.S., annually pays its CEOs millions of dollars. The corporation spent $9.5 million in 2009 to lobby against any federal health care plan, however modest, and utilized 33 lobbying groups in Washington, D.C., to do so.

These huge rate hikes are not unique to California. They are occurring across the country, along with increasing claim delays and outright denials by insurance company administrators whose sole purpose is to do just that in order to boost profits.

And profits are skyrocketing. The top five insurers — UnitedHealth Group, WellPoint, Aetna, Humana and Cigna — have had soaring profits during the economic crisis. In 2009 they had the best year ever, setting record profits totaling $12.2 billion.

Meanwhile, another 2.7 million people lost health care coverage last year, as layoffs cut workers from employer-sponsored plans and incomes decreased for others who could no longer afford private policies.

Nearly 50 million people in the U.S. are uninsured and millions more are underinsured. They go without critical medical care because they can’t afford it. At least 45,000 people will die in 2010 due directly to lack of health care because they don’t have insurance.

These tragic numbers will also rise because Medicaid is on the chopping block in many states, which will harm millions of poor, unemployed and disabled people.

The health care system is terribly broken. We join with activists across the country who are organizing and calling for a single-payer system: improved Medicare for all.

We’d like to see the end of private, for-profit health care altogether and the demise of insurance companies, which serve no useful social purpose. We support a health care system where human needs always come first, where all people get the maximum medical care they need, simply because they need it. We struggle for socialized medicine because health care is a universal human right.