Insurers profit by denying you care

Published 4:49 pm Thursday, August 20, 2009

I learned recently that investors measure insurance company profitability by a thing called the “medical loss ratio.”

What is that exactly? The percentage of your premiums that actually go toward paying for health care. Since the mid-1990s, that percentage has dropped from around 95 percent to below 80 percent.

That means that while the premiums we pay have gone up at four times the rate of inflation, the percentage that the insurance companies have actually paid to doctors and hospitals has dropped more than 15 percent.

The health insurance industry is really the health care denial industry.

The faceless bureaucrat between you and your doctor is a company whose profit depends on denying you the health care you’ve already paid for.

Your “treatment” is the industry’s “medical loss.” Your employer, being squeezed by usurious rates, will increasingly choose the only affordable plan and shift more of the premium burden to you.

The only power you and I have to change this is via legislation.

If we don’t end up with a government option to compete with this extortion scheme, the end result will be more home foreclosures and medical bankruptcies.

Lots more.

We already have faceless bureaucrats deciding on treatments. At least if he’s working for the government, he’ll be paid to deliver care instead of denying it.

Write Congress and urge Rick Larsen, et al., to find a spine, ignore the insurance lobby and do something for the good of his constituents by signing on for the public option.

Christopher Bingham

Snohomish