By GottaLaff
In the past few days, 114,000 Michigan households have received bad-news letters from Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan, socking individual health insurance subscribers with premium increases averaging 22%, effective Oct. 1. [...]What a bargain, huh?
But the chief culprits in the saga of Michigan's skyrocketing cost of individual health insurance are our hapless state legislators in Lansing, who refuse to address the havoc wreaked by rising unemployment and corporate cutbacks in health care benefits.
In just the past two years, the number of under-65 individual subscribers has grown by 59,000, or 96%, at Blue Cross, the nonprofit "insurer of last resort" in Michigan. Private for-profit insurers tend to cherry-pick younger, healthier consumers, driving older and less-healthy people to Blue Cross if they have no employer-provided group coverage.
State law requires Blue Cross to offer insurance to anyone, but it also demands that the company not lose money on its insurance products. Therein lies the rub: Blue Cross lost $133 million last year on individual subscribers. [...]
But Attorney General Mike Cox warned that a Blue Cross-backed bill would weaken regulatory oversight, and legislators decided the matter was too complex to resolve in a hurry. [...]
Well, it's now September and virtually nothing has happened except that Blue Cross asked for a 56% rate hike to cover mounting losses, which Cox and other adversaries wrestled down to 22% in negotiations.
.jpg)