More on the Health Insurance Price Hikes in CA

Both the facts and the reporting of the facts interest me in this story about Anthem/Wellpoint's price increases for individual health insurance in California.

After some searching I found the five-page response letter from Wellpoint -- why don't virtually any of the stories reporting on the increases link to Wellpoint's response, which is available here?

The letter gives some information, but it is not perfect. Brian Sassi, CEO of the Wellpoint Consumer Business Unit makes some good points. He notes that the 39% increase reported is one of the largest increases, not the average. He points out that many increases are related to insured consumers getting older and moving into higher priced tiers. He makes an interesting argument, which is that if insurance has a fixed deductible, and health care costs increase, then there is a phenomenon that he calls "deductible leveraging." This is true; with a fixed deductible and an x% increase in underlying health care costs, the premium will have to increase by more than x% to maintain fair insurance. Why deductibles are not indexed is an interesting question.

He also argues that adverse selection is working powerfully in the individual market. This is probably true.

He argues that many individuals can and do move into lower cost policies (with higher deductible) both before and after price increases. He cited one fact, that a 40 year old woman in LA can obtain a $1500 deductible policy for as low as $156 a month.

What he doesn't do, unfortunately, is give us data on the actual age-constant policy premium increases. Why beat around the bush so badly? Come on, 'fess up and spit it out for crying out loud!

So, a big question here is: Why would Anthem institute rather large price increases in the individual market at a time when such an announcement is sure to cause a huge ruckus?

Theories, with my probabilities:

1. A lower level manager made the moves without thinking about the effect and without alerting upper management. Now the company is in defensive mode. (10%)

2. Upper management made the decision on the basis of sound business analysis, understood the implications, and decided that business trumps politics and they would just deal with the outrage. (35%)

3. Upper management made the decision on the basis of sound business analysis, understood the implications, and decided that it would actually be good to stimulate some debate, since much of the increase follows from the bad state of current policy. (50%)

4. The price changes were not entirely based on sound business analysis, but upper management decided to announce them purposely to stimulate debate. (5%)

Note that the letter from Wellpoint does devote a fair amount to current policy problems, and why the proposals in Congress will not solve these problems:

Unfortunately, the proposed personal coverage requirements in the health care reform legislation passed by both houses of Congress failed all three requirements by (1) exempting tens of millions of Americans from the requirement, (2) using the tax filing process as the only checkpoint which misses tens of millions of Americans who do not file taxes, and (3) including penalties that are a small fraction of the cost of coverage. Under this framework, it is only logical that many individuals— primarily those who are healthy—would have not been captured by the mandate or would have made the logical choice to pay the penalty unless services were needed.