Doctors Blaming Health Insurance Companies, a National Insurance Market and the Decline of Private Insurance
Hello, and welcome to another installment of the Weekly Health Insurance News Roundup. We have a plethora of interesting articles to look, so let's dive right in. The first article comes from Ohio.com and is entitled, "Doctors: Insurance companies endanger patient care." In this article, physicians in Ohio were polled about how they feel interaction with insurance companies affects patient care. According to the poll, 99% of those polled claimed that insurance companies interfere with patient treatment, while 95% claimed insurance companies interfered with prescriptions.
These are somewhat startling numbers. While insurance companies claim they require oversight, and companies want to keep costs low, doctors claim this and other factors are big reasons why the cost of health care is skyrocketing. Insurance companies blame businesses for wanting to keep costs low, so they demand accountability and discretion. I personally understand the need for accountability and oversight, but when we want advice and help on our health, the people we go to and trust are doctors. It doesn't help our trust in doctors if we worry about them being influenced by our own insurance companies. Overall, this article worries me quite a bit, but hopefully something can be done about it in the long run.
The next two articles come from the Wall Street Journal. In the first article, entitled, "We Need a National Market for Health Insurance," makes the case for allowing individuals to shop for health insurance across state lines in order to save money. According to a study by University of Minnesota researches, if Congress allowed such a system, 12 million more people could acquire insurance without any taxpayer expense. High insurance prices in many states, conclude the researches, are due to extensive regulatory mandates, so that the price of insurance in one state might be two to three times higher than insurance in another state.
These mandates apparently add 20% to 50% to the cost of health insurance policies, costs which could be eliminated if a national market was put in place. Sadly, the article says, "laws designed to make health insurance more affordable often backfire." While states tell insurance companies to lower costs, insurance companies feel forced to sell policies to people only when they're sick. It's an odd and interesting situation, but the article goes onto say that "should be giving residents more options to buy policies that suit their budgets, not the priorities of politicians," which I wholeheartedly agree with.
The next article, entitled, "As Private Insurance Declines, Medicare and Medicaid Pick Up the Slack," looks at how low-income and older residents are opting more and more for government run health insurance programs such as Medicare and Medicaid, rather than pay for private health insurance coverage. While the changes aren't that big in terms of raw numbers, they do show a significant enough change to make one notice. Hopefully this will show lawmakers that there is an interest in government subsidized health care.
That concludes this edition of the Weekly Health Insurance News Roundup. As always, I hope you have enjoyed it, and thank you for reading. Have a happy and healthy day.
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