Via Suburban Guerrilla, Health plans say they’ll risk losing members to protect profit margins:
United CEO Stephen Hemsley told investors: “We continue to protect our margins. … We are committed to sustaining a quality business without taking shortsighted pricing positions.”
“We will not sacrifice profitability for membership,” WellPoint President and CEO Angela Braly told analysts during a conference call.
In trying to persuade investors that WellPoint’s problems are “fixable,” CEO Braly emphasized WellPoint’s market power, which she said gives it the ability to lean hard on its network doctors to accept lower reimbursement.
Consolidation over recent years is allowing insurers to raise premiums as well as continue to attack physician reimbursement as a means of attempting to keep profits up, said Susanne Madden, president and CEO of the Verden Group, a health care consulting group in Nyack, N.Y. “With consolidation and there being fewer players comes a certain amount of arrogance,” she said.
Clue, corporations who don't care about patients don't care about investors either. You would have to be a fool to think otherwise.
- DCblogger's blog
- Printer-friendly version
- Login or register to post comments
Front page
Comments
I Used to Joke that One of The Things That I Learned
as a judicial law clerk was that sooner or later your insurance company will screw you over. We had a case where a guy who had leg cancer was denied coverage (after the insurance company pre-approved his hospitalization) because when his plant closed and he, as the foreman, had to fire the employees who worked for him, knowing he himself was out of the job, he had a few months were he was depressed. The insurer tried to claim that he therefore lied on his application when he said he'd never had a mental condition. Yeah, because a normal human reaction is now a "mental condition." I was very proud of the bench trial opinion I worked on with my judge where we used all of the insurance company's view of the law and then ruled on the facts for the poor cancer patient, which essentially made our decision unappealable because appellate courts defer to district courts on findings of fact. My judge was outraged because had it not been for the size of this claim, the insurance company would've collected premiums from this guy for years. Adding further insult, they basically admitted to doing these searches - trying to find some reason to cancel the policy - for a lot of their insured when they had claims.
BTW, one of the other medical related things I learned while clerking is never go to a prison doctor.