Idaho leaders are considering plans to carve up the health care market to save you money. You better be sure which side of the health and wealth teeter totter you fall on, because this could be great news for you or catastrophic. Blue Cross of Idaho is already on board. Should you be?
Do you know if you are going to be hit by a drunk driver? Will you have cancer next month? Or will your wife have a baby too early? I’m a doctor, I studied predisposing conditions, risks and genetics, and I can’t say I knew the answers to these questions. Sometimes I did, but it was usually long after any enrollment period. Insurance companies are multibillion dollar financial betting organizations; they have experts to answer these questions. And they have a bottom line to meet. I figure they know a good deal when they see one. They don’t want expensive patients, and you don’t want expensive patients in your insurance plan.
The fundamental premise of insurance is to pool risk. Before the Affordable Care Act, if insurance companies saw your risk as too great, they could refuse you; no more. They got more customers with the (now repealed) mandate to buy insurance, but they gave up denying folks with preexisting conditions.
The ACA tried to get people to be good shoppers; you would assess your risk, and then chose on the exchange from comparable plans that would suit your needs. It’s been pretty popular here in Idaho, with record enrollments, year after year. Before the ACA, if you wanted to shop for individual plans, it was worse than shopping for jeans that made you look good, with no changing room.
True, the ACA mandated there should be a minimum level of benefits, and limited the range of benefits (Gold, Silver, Lead), but this was to make the marketplace press the insurance companies to cut health care costs. They have barely made a dent, even though Medicare and Medicaid has been effective at containing costs in the last 6 years. They have leverage. Private insurers have not been able to leverage health care providers, or consumers (YOU) to decrease consumption, improve efficiency, and thus lower costs. So now the white knights arrive.
Cameron and Otter suggest more choice; they claim more slices of the insurance pie will lower costs. Well, they will for you if you don’t get hit by a bus or get cancer and you have chosen the right plan that covers such events. If not, then what? Then somebody else pays.
No, these guys embrace the Wild West solution to the health care conundrum. You get to look at the cards in your hand and make a bet. And if you go bust, the county takes your horse and saddle and your neighbors insurance rates go up.
We need leverage folks, and leverage is in numbers. Splitting us up, as Cameron and Otter propose just weakens our leverage. It is no mystery that the leading employer in most Idaho counties is a health care institution. It is a huge industry, a huge sector of our economy. If we don’t like how it’s working, we can try to organize and get the leverage to solve the problem. That’s what our leaders should be doing.