StupidiNews Focus

More on this morning's StupidiNews story on health insurance company WellPoint: to sum up, the nation's largest health insurance company is cutting the health insurance benefits of its own 42,000 employees.

WellPoint Inc., the largest U.S. insurer, dismissed a "small number" of workers last week and announced cuts to employee health benefits Friday, in its latest attempt to deal with the recession's toll on enrollment.

WellPoint eliminated the positions last week and expects to let more go before year's end, though the number will be "relatively small," Kristin Binns, a spokeswoman, said in a telephone interview. The company will also raise deductibles and premiums for some of its employee health benefits, the Indianapolis-based insurer told workers in a memo obtained by Bloomberg.

In the memo from Randy Brown, WellPoint's chief human resources officer, the company said it would lower its contribution toward worker premiums and raise deductibles in two of its three benefit plans. "Your cost per paycheck will probably increase," the memo said.

Despite the company's substantial profits, they're taking it out on the employees, just like the rest of America's businesses. Our health insurance industry has gotten so bad that health insurance companies are raising premiums on their own employees. That's how badly health insurance premiums have gotten out of control, and much of that comes from health insurance giants like WellPoint having effective monopolies in areas of the country.

Mergers and acquisitions in the health insurance industry have resulted in fewer and fewer insurers controlling regional markets like Dayton’s, proponents of competition say.

An AMA analysis found that the number of health insurance companies declined by nearly 20 percent between 2000 and 2007, with the result that 94 percent of insurance markets in the United States have become “highly concentrated.” In 13 years, HCAN says, there have been 400 mergers.

“Some insurance companies spend as little as 80 cents of every dollar (they collect in premiums) on health care,” said Cathy Levine, executive director of the Universal Health Care Action Network of Ohio, a consumer advocacy group based in Columbus.

The remaining 20 percent goes to administration and profit, Levine said, compared to the 2 percent to 3 percent that Medicare pays for its administrative expenses.

94 percent of us live in areas where one health insurance company controls more than 50 percent of the employer health plans in the area. Nearly every American who gets health care from an employer has that health care come from a single insurer that dominates the market and can raise premiums at will...and has raised premiums at will.

A study by Health Care for America Now, a national coalition of labor, community and faith-based groups, says premiums for Ohio’s working families grew 8.5 times faster than their incomes from 2000 to 2007, in part because of a “highly concentrated” insurance market.

The profit motive in health care is killing us. Literally. We need a public option, period.