The Insurance Industry's Lethal Bottom Line -- and a Solution From Sens. Franken and Rockefeller

Wendell Potter makes a number of good points, but he has thrown in with people whose objectives are to collectivize the economy, and they are just as bad as those Potter "blew the whitstle" on. Instead of having the government grab control of 1/6th of the economy as proposed by the idiotic 2700 pages of legislation know colloquially as "ObamaCare," if we had the moral courage to take ONE STEP AT A TIME, we should be able to agree on any number of BASIC elements, among them portability, intrastate competition,TORT REFORM, private carriers having "assigned risks" divided up among them for those who otherwise would not be able to get coverage, etc.

Anyone who has ever seen an EOB where their carrier settled a bill (including your copay) for 22% of the "sticker price" billed (that is, with 78% "written off") knows that free markets have not worked because we don't HAVE free markets. We have providers and carriers engaged in a tug-of-war that leave patients (i.e., the party for who they are supposed to be Hippocratic oath-bound angels of mercy and financial intermediaries, respectively) out in the cold. The best cure for 2700 pages of complexity is frequently simplicity; we can solve THAT one with ONE SIMPLE LAW, the morality of which is self evident. To wit:

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The purpose of this Act is to promote free market competition in order to retard inflation of health care prices.

(1) Any health care provider shall be free to set its own prices for any given service and to change such prices at will (but not more frequently than daily),

AND

(2) each health care provider shall be required to charge the same amount to all its patients for each particular service delivered on the same date, regardless of whether or by whom the patient’s care is insured.
________________________________________________________________

One insurance and economics professor told me that carriers "deserve" discounts for the "tremendous volume" they bring providers. I asked him what financial intermediary "deserves" anything at the expense of the principal party it serves; I asked what medical bill is not billed INDIVIDUALLY to one "customer" (the patient). No one buys 500 kidney transplants at once to get a "discount!"

Under the two simple rules stated above, providers would be at liberty to set their own prices (the absence of which killed HillaryCare). They would also assume responsibility for setting their rates high enough to cover a reasonable profit and some bad debt experience, along with the cost of collections. Carriers would have to LIST their payout rates for all medical service codes in the contract BEFORE they sold the policy to an end user. Patients need to be financially responsible for any balance left over. THIS IS HOW ANY OTHER FREE MARKET WORKS WITH INSURANCE PLAYING A FINANCIAL INTERMEDIARY ROLE.

While other elements (portability, etc.) are needed, they will ultimately fail to provide real reform WITHOUT these rules to rationalize pricing fairly. Further, these two rules in a truly free market would do more to contain inflation in healthcare (and make insurers competitive) than all the other elements added together.

Why NOT do this? And why not do it FIRST?

NOTES:

A. It is immoral to allow the shell game of artificially inflated “Sticker Prices” for health care. In an industry supposedly motivated by altruism and the Hippocratic Oath, it is simply unjust to coerce people into cartels of insurance coverage (whether public or private) and systematically prevent disclosure of real prices – which is exactly what the present system does on nearly every “Explanation of Benefits” form. Whether CIGNA or AETNA pays the bill should make no more difference to either the provider or the patient than the races or religions of doctor and patient.

B. The dishonest quotation of fictitious and exorbitant “Sticker Prices” with phony discounts or write-offs applied to them deprives Americans of the competitive effects of genuinely free markets, and should be banned as collusion by federal anti-trust laws.

C. The call to fix prices (as in HillaryCare) or coerce employers to provide care as a fringe benefit (ObamaCare) distorts the competitive effects of an otherwise free market, and should be discouraged, if not banned outright as illegal.

D. A common objection is “what about those who don’t pay anything?” The truth is, people who are taxpayers and those who are insured are paying for them NOW. Truth in pricing would use free market mechanisms to (1) identify such costs, and (2) bring competition among providers to bear in containing such costs in a way that is not done effectively now.

E. Real honesty in pricing will employ free market competition to bring about more reform in health care in one year than all efforts WITHOUT such honesty can in a decade.

Wendell:
You are in a unique position and I get the feeling you are treading on egg shells. There is more you can do and I believe you have more insight to share.

At the very least you could find out times and places for "Health Fairs" around the country that lead to your epiphany about health insurance and place this information on your blog for all people that might need this information. That would be a big help to us that do not have health insurance.

Thanks for what you can do.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

I greatly admire Mr. Potter for his guts in coming forward, and for his contribution to returning the health care debate to some level of sanity.

I do have a comment about his statement on MSNBC to the effect that it can be hard to get good numbers on medical loss ratios and the ability of insurers to fudge the numbers with accounting tricks. They may certainly try to do that, but if Congress enacts proper standards, it should be possible for even the most naive regulator to find the correct number.

I was able to get a back-of-the-envelope number simply by using publicly available Census Bureau tables. Although the data available to me was out of date -- from 2006 -- I was able to confirm the general belief that MLR averages 80% or less.

In 2006, according to the Census Bureau, total personal income was a little under eleven trillion dollars. After taxes, they had $9.63 trillion to spend. During the same year, total national expenditures on health care were 2.11 trillion dollars -- an amazing 22% of net personal income.

Now, although $2.11 trillion was spent on health care, only $1.97 trillion was spent on actual health care goods and services. The difference, about 140 billion dollars, is presumably the “net cost” incurred by non-health care providers (i.e., insurance companies, HMOs and similar gatekeepers). That figure includes any income not directly spent for health care, such as advertising, marketing, sales commissions, premium taxes, additions to reserves, and profit.

In 2006, $723.4 billion was spent on health insurance premiums. Deducting the $140 billion leaves $583.4 billion spent on health care providers, which works out to a loss ratio of 80.6 percent. Since the providers spent some of that money on their own advertising and marketing, and their profits, the actual amount spent on direct health care is probably quite a bit less. If the providers spent 90% of their income on health care, that would result in a real MLR of 72.5%.

I was a math major in college, but I'm a lawyer, not a statistician. The lesson is that if I could derive these numbers in half an hour using public information, regulators getting detailed figures from each company could easily do a more accurate job. The key is not to add, but to subtract!

I recently resigned from my independent "consulting" job as a medical consultant performing UR (utilization review) for a very large insurance company. My task was to decide if a medical diagnostic and or treatment request should be prospectively approved, denied, or modified based on the claim history and the use of clinical guidelines.

It became clear to me that my role (and that of my peers was not so independent) and too many of those who made these decisions without ever seeing the claimant used these guides as they were mandates and or standards of care. These decisions were then dictating care not delivered. This process and a statement from my "superior" re: the "% of my approvals" after more than 6 years led to my decision to resign and attempt to blow the whistle.

With health care reform, "evidence based medicine" in the form of guidelines will be used as a manner to decide what should be considered "medically necessary" and may be used in their literal "black and white" language, rather than as a "guide" and in consideration of the individual case in it's totality in context.

The 2009 ARRA has appropriated $1.2B from the DHHS to arrive at "comparative effectiveness research" which will produce more these guidelines for future use( i.e., recall mammogram controversy) when deciding what medical testing and care is "necessary"......

Too often, these guides are not applicable to the case based on the many variables these guides do not take into account. Thus, a provider and their patient need to make an informed and consented upon decision after reviewing these guides in context to the specific case.

It's important that any legislation includes the appropriate use of any guides and should never be used solely as a means to deny care of any type.

I think you've gone a long way toward redemption from the work you did against the public interest as PR exec for CIGNA.
It is remarkable how, even with a public who are much more educated about this issue than they were in the past, and even with films like Michael Moore's Sicko, and even with an ex-insider such as yourself testifying to congress just how corrupt and murderous the system has become, the forces of greed and corruption still hold sway over our political process.
I fear that, unless all political campaigns are publicly funded, we will continue to rush headlong into corporate serfdom.
Thanks for the work you've done this year. For what it's worth, I can't think of what else you COULD have done... the end result was predetermined.
By the way, I would say that your assertion that Obama was outwitted by the industry is not really accurate; he has been shilling for PhRMA & AHIP from the moment he was inaugurated. Glenn Greenwald's perceptive Dec. 16 article at Salon illustrates the true White House stance toward the "stakeholders" (campaigndonors):