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Over at Huffington Post, Wendell Potter, former Cigna executive who is now doing heroic advocacy for healthcare reform, blogs about a healthcare amendment you need to know about. Senators Franken and Rockefeller are pushing to hold for-profit insurance companies to account by mandating they spend 90% of every premium dollar on medical care.
It’s called MLR — medical loss ratio.
An interesting twist of phrase. Actually providing the service for which people are paying their insurance companies is considered a "loss."
It should be Moral Leadership Return.
Insurance companies actually having ethics, moral responsibility, you know, all those old-fashioned values that the values crowd corrupts to line the pockets of Wall Street, buy the yachts and the Bentleys and Gulfstreams and the penthouse lofts and mcMansions.
Dancing around their 21st century version of the Golden Calf while turning a blind eye to the parable values of the Jewish guy with the loaves and fishes and healing touch.
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crossposted at Prairie Sun Rising
4 Comments
Some factual history:
In 1871, State insurance regulators created the National Association of Insurance Commissioners to address the need to coordinate regulation of multistate insurers.
In 1945, the insurance industry was granted an Anti-Trust exemption, giving the responsibility to states to regulate insurance, in response to a Supreme Court ruling stating otherwise. In short, Congress passed a law to overturn the Supreme Court.
There is no longer any excuse to allow this to continue. If we are reforming health care, this must be addressed.
Is there any fact on the ground that would indicate that we don’t need the protection offered by Anti-Trust laws re: the health insurance industry?
SOME SERIOUS CULPRITS, enabling the insurers:
I blame this organization and the Insurance Commissioners for the states for our dilemma, quite frankly. If you go to the link below and read their mission statement, it’s hard not to give them a great big FAIL! I has all the appearance of the fox watching the hen house, quite frankly.
http://www.naic.org/index_about.htm
The NAIC home page is here:
http://www.naic.org/
Regulate multistate insurers? since 1871? And, in 1945, insurers are exempted from Anti-Trust because the states alone are empowered to regulate them? Palease.
If you are going to apportion blame, don’t forget state legislators. The states legislate wrt insurance; sometimes the feds do too and pre-empt state law. The Insurance Commissioners can only regulate within the framework of the law.
Better yet, implement Single Payer and the anti-trust exemption is moot.
Poor Wendell is out there trying to tell everyone, and the only ones seeming to listen to Him, seem to be us who have no control over it.
He testified to the Congress and was basically just dismissed.