The Real Reasons Insurers Are Canceling Policies

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/wendell-potter/the-real-reasons-insurers_b_4296212.html

Wendell Potter
11/18/2013

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There are other reasons some folks are being told they'll have to change health plans next year. Many of them are having to switch plans not because of Obamacare but because their insurance companies want to move them into policies with higher profit margins.

Insurance companies have been sending similar notices to their customers for years. My son Alex -- and thousands of other customers of a Blue Cross plan in Pennsylvania -- got such a notice four years ago, months before Congress passed the health reform law.

Why? The insurer wanted to move those policyholders out of a plan with a reasonable $500 annual deductible and into one with a deductible ten times that amount. To accomplish that, Blue Cross notified its policyholders that their health plan would not be available in 2010. Their options were to switch to the high-deductible policy, which would still cost them a couple of dollars more each month, or to another plan with that reasonable $500 deductible. If they chose the latter, their monthly premiums would increase 65 percent.

Notices like the one Alex got have provided a mechanism for insurers to implement a years-long industry strategy of shifting more and more of the cost of medical care to their policyholders. And that strategy will continue until every last one of us is in a high-deductible plan.

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