HARTFORD — Connecticut Health Care For America Now released a study Thursday that spotlights how private health insurance companies “waste premiums.”
Health Care for America Now is comprised of more than 1,000 organizations representing more than 30 million people nationwide.
Connecticut HCAN supports the “Ensuring Value for Premiums” amendment to health care reform legislation pending in the U.S. Senate. The legislation, introduced Dec. 4 by U.S. Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., requires private insurance companies to spend 90 percent of their revenue from premiums on health care-related costs. The remaining 10 percent of the premium would be used to build in overhead, profits and other non-medical payout charges.
Private health insurance companies spend, on average, 81 percent of their premium revenues on health care-related costs. In Connecticut, one company, Wellpoint, spends 83.6 percent of premium dollars on care.
By comparison, Medicare spends almost 98 percent of its premium revenues on health care-related costs.
Why do we need State consumer protection laws, once we have the Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPA)?
States must be able to address problems within their borders, before they become nation-wide problems. Purely local problems do not need national legislation. These issues are best dealt with at the State and local levels.
Won’t this result in the CFPA and the States issuing rules on the same topic?
No. Historically, the States have stepped in where Federal policymakers have failed to establish adequate protections. The CFPA is intended to avert such failures in the future. If the CFPA does its job, it will ensure that consumers are adequately protected, and States will not feel compelled to go further. State legislators are subject to the same pressures as all other policy makers, and they do not seek out reasons to push back against the lending industry. Keeping alive the States’ traditional role will provide a backstop against lapses at the federal level and extra assurance that consumers will be appropriately protected. This will also incent industry to cooperate with efforts by the CFPA to issue protections that are appropriately robust and effective.
Are there other advantages to retaining the State’s traditional role in policymaking?
State laws responding to local problems provide useful models and data points for policymakers in other States and at the Federal level. This keeps our policies vibrant and innovative, and enables Federal policymakers to develop best practices based on the experiences of the States.
Click here to continue reading two news clips about the Consumer Financial Protection Agency.
The large turnout for Tuesday's action at the Aetna Building in Hartford received some attention from Sharon Bass at CT News Junkie:
About 150 health-care reform activists rallied with Smith outside of Aetna’s sprawling campus on Farmington Avenue Tuesday afternoon. They came to ask CEO Ronald Williams to sign a pledge promising to stop denying coverage to people with pre-existing conditions, to stop denying care when customers get sick, and to not lobby against health-reform proposals supported by President Obama and his allies in Congress, especially a provision for a public health option.
The demonstration was one of 150 across the country, simultaneously protesting unhealthy insurance practices and yelling for change in the way this country does medicine.
By EDMUND H. MAHONY | The Hartford Courant | 5:22 PM EDT, August 28, 2009
Connecticut elections officials reacted with sharp criticism and promised an all-out legal fight Friday after a federal judge threw out the state's landmark campaign finance law, saying it puts minor-party office seekers at an unconstitutional disadvantage when they challenge traditionally better-financed major-party candidates.
The following is an unsigned editorial appearing in the Connecticut Post that urges state legislators to do the right thing and override Governor Rell's veto of the SustiNet and Healthcare Partnership bills:
In vetoing a pair of health plans last week that would have gone a long way toward achieving universal health coverage in Connecticut, Gov. M. Jodi Rell cited costs, especially in the midst of a recession. She said the state couldn't pay for it. And she said the developing situation in Washington might make the whole process moot.
She had her reasons. She just happens to be wrong.
The following unsigned editorial was published in The Day shortly after Governor Rell vetoed the SustiNet and Healthcare Partnership bills on July 8, 2009:
Given the chance to begin health care reform, Gov. M. Jodi Rell opted for inaction by vetoing two reform bills Wednesday and appointing yet another advisory board.
No more blue-ribbon panels are necessary to sort out the myriad problems with the health care system in the state. A group of experts did that and the results were the bills the governor rejected. Forming a study panel is an obvious attempt to deflect political criticism of the veto, not find a solution.
Gov. Rell is right when she says Connecticut is strapped for cash and unable to fund new initiatives right now. But the so-called “pooling” and Sustinet bills she vetoed would have created the framework to build an improved health care system over time.
The Sustinet plan would not have begun enrollment until 2012 and stretched implementation over five years. Combined, the two bills would establish universal health care and allow nonprofit organizations, small businesses and municipalities to join the state's insurance pool. The bills, if enacted, would establish the conceptual structure to provide decent, affordable health care to everyone in the state, including the approximately 325,000 uninsured residents.
Forming a 15-member Connecticut Health Care Reform Advisory Board - and charging it with developing health care policies to mesh with whatever reforms the Congress approves - is straight from the Rell administration playbook. When unwilling to act, form a study panel.
Senator Dodd is a senior member of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, and authored an op-ed published in the New London Day on the critical importance of health care reform.
In it, Sen. Dodd uses the overwhelming turnout at each of his four CT Prescriptions for Change events -- in particular, the first, which was held early on a cold Friday morning in January -- as evidence of the tremendous will to see real health care reform enacted. (Video from all four forums is available on the CCAG site: East Hartford, Danbury, New London, and Derby).
Health care costs are rising faster than our economy is growing, crushing family budgets and businesses alike. Already Americans spend 18 cents of every dollar on health care. If we continue down this path, that figure will double by 2040. This week, we learned that 62 percent of all personal bankruptcies were caused by medical problems. And today, nearly half of all home foreclosures are attributable, in part, to financial issues stemming from medical costs.
We've clearly reached a tipping point. Today, some 46 million Americans are without health insurance - including more than 322,000 in Connecticut; millions more have insurance that costs too much and covers too little. Meanwhile, premiums and out-of-pocket costs for individuals and families alike continue to skyrocket. Here in Connecticut, they're up 42 percent over the last eight years alone.
That's not only unacceptable - it's completely unsustainable.
The most significant line in this op-ed, however, is Sen. Dodd's statement of unequivocal support for a public option (emphasis added):
For me, the bottom line is that we need to preserve the ability for people to choose their own doctors, hospitals, and insurance plans. If you like what you have, you can keep it; if you don't, you'll finally have affordable options available to you. In my view, that must include a public health insurance option in addition to private options.
It seems that Sen. Dodd has become more fully convinced of the merits of the public health option, though he has liked the idea for awhile.
SustiNet and the Healthcare Partnership bill recently passed the state House and Senate by wide margins, and received a fair amount of local media coverage.
Christine Stuart at CT News Junkie reports on Saturday's passage of both bills in the state Senate -- SustiNet by a vote of 23-12 and the Healthcare Partnership bill by a vote of 21-12:
Health care advocates will turn their lobbying efforts toward Rell in the next few weeks as the bill makes its way to her desk.
“Few elected leaders ever get such a perfect opportunity to enact major reform,” Juan A. Figueroa, president of Universal Health Care Foundation of Connecticut, said Saturday in a press release. “The House, the Senate, and the people of Connecticut have delivered one such defining moment to Governor Rell.”
CCAG Executive Director Tom Swan has an op-ed in the Connecticut Post about the recently passed Credit Card Accountability, Responsibility and Disclosure Act, which was sponsored by Chris Dodd, Connecticut's senior Senator.
Tom Swan speaks about how the unfair practices of credit card companies affect CCAG members and others in Connecticut. [March 13, 2009]
The bill puts an end to absurdly high fees that drive families further into debt, requiring that penalties be proportional to the violation and prohibiting issuers from charging fees when customers simply pay by phone or unknowingly exceed their credit limit.
It prevents credit card companies from charging you if they delayed crediting your payment and requires far better disclosure of card terms and conditions.
It includes tough protections for the particularly vulnerable demographic that has been a cash cow for credit card companies in recent years: young people and students.
Measure Would Guarantee Medical Coverage To Any State Resident
HARTFORD - The state House of Representatives took a major step Wednesday night toward resolving an issue that has long defied a solution -- guaranteeing health care coverage to tens of thousands of Connecticut residents without health insurance.
After a debate that lasted 2½ hours, the House voted largely along party lines, 107-35, for a landmark bill aimed at achieving universal health care in Connecticut by creating a public insurance pool that anyone could join, regardless of their health history.
The pool, backed by a coalition of social activists, religious leaders and Democratic lawmakers, would be based on the existing pool for state employees, and is designed to compete with -- not replace -- private insurance plans.
It is still not clear when, or if, the so-called SustiNet plan could become law.
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