With the strokes of President Obama’s 20 pens the rampantly discriminatory health insurance industry that I worked in as a saleswoman finally got what it so often issued to policy applicants: an automatic decline that will stick.
Let me give you examples of what I learned from my so-called career selling health plans to Colorado’s self-employed. Although I went through the charade of taking an applicant’s health history, I knew from weekly sales meetings that we were “cherry-pickers,” the term used for finding healthy clients who never had so much as an ingrown toenail, or were savvy enough never to admit it.
Virtually anything that was checked ‘yes’ on the policy application listing dozens of health conditions meant an automatic decline by our company’s underwriters – whoever they were – or, as in the case of treatment for acne, an additional premium so steep as to make a policy unaffordable.
Pregnancy? Never, that of course meant no prenatal care, either. We were provided with a long list of brand and generic medications, which if a person acknowledged ever having taken — any psychotropic drug prescribed for the treatment of mental illness, for example — an automatic decline would be issued.
Statins, a class of cholesterol-lowering medications, also resulted in underwriting declines or 100 percent “write-ups.” As a self-employed person in excellent health, I did not take this medication for that reason. Health insurance coverage decisions were not being made by medically trained physicians back at Health Insurance HQ in Texas, but by underwriters.
I knew health insurance sales reps so concerned about their own bottom line that they covertly advised applicants not to admit to health conditions that resulted in automatic declines. Automatic declines for pre-existing conditions were so numerous that we got permission to end the interview once the prospect revealed something we knew was going to cost us our commission.
Thankfully the new health insurance law of the land recognizes that people are not cherries to be picked, and that underwriters are not medically trained. They weren’t even making intelligent business decisions since they were prejudicially shrinking the applicant pool.
The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act extending the right to health insurance is no more perfect than any of America’s landmark social legislation has been, each of which was viciously opposed on economic grounds. But the health care reform act does rank with laws that ended slavery, gave women the right to vote, and prohibited racial discrimination in advancing the promise of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
Dyana Z. Furmansky is a Mental Health America of Colorado Board Member. She lives in Denver. EDITOR’S NOTE: This is an online-only column and has not been edited.
