Health Insurers to Consumers: Want to Know What You're Buying Before You Buy It? Only If You Pay for It

Health plans increasingly provide user-friendly online tools and clear materials to make sure that consumers understand the benefits and costs of their health insurance policies. The benefits of providing a new summary of coverage document must be balanced against the increased administrative burden and higher costs to consumers and employers.

Hogwash. First, consumers need information before they enroll in a health plan, not just afterwards. The online tools and materials AHIP referred to in its statement typically are available only to people already enrolled. Second, insurers can comply with the new rules without charging consumers and employers another nickel. All the insurers will have to do is redirect some of the billions of dollars they already spend on marketing, advertising, sales and underwriting every year, activities of little if any value to most consumers.

AHIP claims to represent more than 1,300 health plans. Well, between 2001 and 2010, just the five largest of those 1,300 collectively made more than $76 billion in profits. If just five companies made that much money, imagine how much all 1,300 of them pulled in.

The insurance industry comprises a bunch of very prosperous and profitable corporations that could spend $50 million to comply with these new rules -- and finally give us information they should have been providing all along -- and not even miss it.

It would be hardly more than a rounding error to even one of the big companies.
It's about time the government took action to end these companies' practices that -- yes, I'll have to say it again -- "make it nearly impossible to understand, or even to obtain, information we need."

 1  |  2