Much of our economy may be limping along, but the health insurance industry is doing just fine. Three companies — UnitedHealth, WellPoint and Aetna — recently reported a combined $2.51 billion in earnings from April through the end of June. On average, these earnings are up more than 17 percent compared to the same period in 2010. In fact, health insurance companies have reported higher profits than analysts predicted for several quarters in a row.
However, don’t expect any reductions in your policy premiums. IOne way the insurance companies are heaping up profits is by expecting their customers to pay more. Annual double-digit percentage premium increases and higher co-pays are par for the course.
However, another profit booster came courtesy of the Affordable Care Act, also known as “Obamacare.” The Act provides that young people who don’t have health insurance can stay on their parents’ plans until age 26. Opponents of health care reform shrieked that this provision would be ruinous to, well, somebody. But it’s been great for insurance companies, because all those young people represent new premium income, and on the whole this group doesn’t need a lot of medical care. So they aren’t costing much.
However, reports say that even insured Americans overall are not receiving as much medical care as they used to, which has padded insurance company profits even more. And no one seems to be looking closely to find out why people aren’t going to doctors as much as they used to. The insurance companies are accused of refusing to pay expensive claims, but whether that’s the real reason for the drop in demand for health care is hard to say. It may be that Americans are increasingly unwilling even to cough up the co-pay to get professional medical care.
Further, many insured Americans are moving into high-deductible plans. These plans have much lower premiums but require that patients pay the first several hundred to several thousand dollars of their annual expenses out of their own pockets. People who switch to high-deductible plans find themselves thinking twice about seeing doctors for minor problems.
Fewer hospital visits and hospital admissions may cause health care costs to rise more slowly. On the other hand, it might also mean that serious medical problems are not caught as early, making them more difficult and more expensive to treat.
For years, half of all health care costs in the U.S. is spent on only 5 percent of the population. These 5 percent are the most extremely sick among us, such as those suffering from mesothelioma. That percentage is not likely to change anytime soon.
This entry was posted on Monday, August 15th, 2011 at 2:06 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
0 comments:
Post a Comment