Colorado insurance company executives said Tuesday that they don’t deserve the “demonization” they’re receiving in the health care debate and that they support reform.
“We’re not against it,” said Beth Soberg, president of UnitedHealthcare of Colorado. “We’re not trying to kill it. We want to see it happen.”
They just aren’t in favor of a public, government-run option.
Instead, they want reforms that would require everyone to have insurance and provide government subsidies for people who can’t afford it. In exchange, they agree to stop rejecting people because of pre-existing health conditions.
A public plan is guaranteed to pile on massive debt and is the first step toward creating an American health care system run completely by the government, the so-called single-payer plan, argued executives from United, Cigna, Rocky Mountain Health Plans and Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield. The executives visited The Denver Post’s editorial board on Tuesday.
“I don’t have a lot of confidence that the government is going to be able to accurately forecast what the public plan would cost,” said Daryl Edmonds, president of Cigna for the Colorado region.
The main problem with a public health plan is that it likely would include reimbursement rates for physicians and hospitals that are similar to Medicare and Medicaid, said John Hopkins, chief executive officer of Rocky Mountain Health Plans.
Doctors say those payments are inadequate, causing them to break even, or in some cases lose money, when they care for Medicare or Medicaid patients. And patients complain they have a hard time finding a doctor who accepts Medicare or Medicaid.
A public option likely would offer lower premiums than private insurance companies because of its lower reimbursement rates, insurance executives predicted. That, they said, would cause people to leave private insurance in favor of the public option, saddling the country with even more debt.
It’s unnecessary to enact “radical” reform to capture the 15 percent of Americans without insurance, Edmonds said.
But others argue that insurance companies jump to the worst-case scenario of a public plan. And they point out that the details of such a plan — including reimbursement rates — are still unknown.
They say it makes more sense to put subsidies into a public plan, not the pockets of insurance companies.
“Is that the most efficient use of taxpayers’ dollars to cover everybody — to subsidize for-profit companies that are doing very, very well?” said Denise de Percin, executive director of the Colorado Consumer Health Initiative. “I think a lot of people really balk at that.”
Jennifer Brown: 303-954-1593
