Olympia Snowe strikes again (Yglesias)

[Mass]

The darling from the Democrats seems intent to make sure that the bill coming out of the Finance Committee has no restrictions for insurance companies.

After having voted against 2 public option bills, and a host of other bills that could have helped customers, she now wants to make sure that the exchange will be useless when it comes to helping consumers. I had not seen this one, so I assume it happened Thursday night. I just hope that the Democrats in the Senate and the White House now understand to what point she is useless.

http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/archives/2009/10/olympia-snowe-strikes-again.php

Olympia Snowe looks set to reprise her roll in hobbling the stimulus bill in exchange for providing the key pivotal vote for it by killing John Kerry’s amendment, “Empowering State Exchanges to be Prudent Purchasers.” Jon Cohn explains:

In the bills that passed three House committees and the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee, the exchange would be a “prudent purchaser.” In other words, it would have a staff that bargained with insurers to bring down premiums — and that made sure all plans lived up to strict guidelines for coverage and customer service. In effect, any insurer that wants to offer coverage through the exchanges has to get the equivalent of a “Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval” from the administrators. This is precisely how it works in Massachusetts.

By contrast, the Senate Finance bill envisions much weaker exchanges. Instead of choosing which plans to make available, the exchange administrators would, by law, have to accept any plan that meets a relatively minimal set of standards.

There are several problems with this. One is that it’s going to be a mess for consumers. Another is that it threatens to turn the exchanges into playgrounds of implicit risk-shifting efforts wherein companies try to design policies specifically around dissuading high-need people from signing up. Thus ever-more burden is going to be placed on the untested risk-adjustment machinery that’s supposed to even this all out. Ezra Klein observes that Jon Kingsdale is basically the only person in America’s who’s run anything like the exchanges envisioned in all the different bills—he does the job in Massachusetts—and he views the prudent purchaser rule as absolutely essential. Against that Snowe is pitting, I guess, her intuition that this is too much government involvement.

It is not, however, as if people in Maine did not know insurance companies are not to be trusted.
(video and end of the post at the link)
http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2009/10/socialized-profits-by-dday-wild-story.html

A wild story out of Maine.

Anthem Health Plans of Maine, a subsidiary of WellPoint, is suing the state because they want to increase premium rates by 18.5% on their 12,000 individual insurance policy holders, so they can guarantee themselves a 3% profit margin. This story shows how silly it would be to solely rely on regulation to rein in insurance industry practices.

Like many other states, Anthem Health Plans hold a monopoly on the individual insurance market in Maine, controlling 79% of all the plans. Also like many other states, they are licensed to sell insurance through the Department of Insurance, who must clear all rate increases prior to implementation. Originally, Anthem Health Plans were a nonprofit Blue Cross and Blue Shield corporation licensed to practice in Maine since 1939. In 1999, Anthem bought the business and began to operate it as a for-profit company. Since that point, Anthem has raised premium rates 10 times, and 8 of those times have been double-digit rate increases.

Jan-99: 20.4%
Nov-99: 15.7%
Jan-01: 23.5%
Feb-02: 12.7%
Jan-03: 3.4%
Mar-05: 14.5%
Mar-06: 16.3%
Jan-07: 16.7%
Jul-07: 1.3%
Jan-08: 12.5%

The average individual Maine rate-payer is paying four times as much for insurance than they did ten years ago.

But this isn't good enough for Anthem Health Plans. They first proposed a 14.5% rate increase for its individual insurance products, then they revised it up to 18.1% and finally 18.5%. This is an average increase. Some plans would see increase of 24.5%, some 38.4%, and for its Preventive Care and Supplemental Care Accident rider, which is part of 1/3 of all their policies, Anthem proposed a rate increase of 58.2%. This amounts to Maine consumers paying $12 million more in annual premium dollars for the exact same level of benefits.

[RepublicanElephant]

1. i've never understood what all the fuss was about snowe.

look at her voting record.

watch the right-wing echo points she delivers on the senate floor.

bottom line is you can't trust a SINGLE repub in congress to do the right thing on a regular basis.