BC/BS warns of health cost rise: Does this make sense?

http://www.bcbs.com/news/national/study-health-costs-to-rise-nearly-10-percent.html is an article on the BC/BS website that describes a study by Price Waterhouse Coopers that "predicts that medical costs will increase 9.9 percent in 2008." The brief summary then describes that "TWO FACTORS ARE DRIVING THE INCREASE", the first is "a hospital building boom," and the second is "an increase in the expenses those with insurance are paying for those without." The response is "increasing wellness, prevention and disease management programs."

My take? This is the most ridiculous part about the health insurance dialogue. How does increasing wellness programs help employers facing higher medical costs attributed to hospital building and the coverage of the uninsured by those with insurance?

It seems obvious, reduce the cost of covering those with insurance by attempting to keep them well, that way more of those premium dollars can go to cover the costs described by the study that have NOTHING to do with individual insured health.

So why the idiotic solutions to the problem? Because at this point in time, health insurers have only one answer, squeeze the premium paying consumer by providing less assistance in paying for needed medical care and expanding "wellness" programs, a cheap way of generating a list of covered services.

Now it becomes more interesting because BC/BS just happens to contract with third party companies that will call you and represent that they are BC/BS, using your health information to try to get you to opt in to their telephone monitoring of your "condition." Are you taking your insulin? Watching your weight?

Health insurance premiums have transformed into a tax. That's why MA could do its "mandatory" health insurance program where individuals who opt out of health insurance will be forced to pay a fee, you can't opt out of taxes. The problem is that unlike other taxes, individuals paying the tax require a direct benefit of their taxes when it comes to health insurance. When we pay state taxes, we don't get to choose the roads that are fixed, or the school bonds floated, or the raise in governmental employee salaries and for the most part we all know, you can't fight city hall. However, the health insurance tax is different, individuals must reap the benefit of their health insurance premium tax...we can't continue to ignore where our premium dollars are spent by health insurance companies without continuing to face increased costs for fewer services in the form of needed medical services.

Health insurers don't have the authority or power to reduce hospital building or to somehow extort money out of the uninsured without the passage of mandatory health insurance coverage provisions. They therefore regulate and re-regulate those they do have control over, their insureds. The study shows that hospital building and the uninsured cost health insurance companies money. They will cover those costs through increases in the rates charged to their customers. In order to keep those rate increases in the single digits (9.9 % is not 10%), insureds can look forward to additional reductions in coverage of needed medical services. Wellness programs are the solution for insurers, they're cheap (as opposed to treatment), they're popular (people feel like they're being proactive with their health and they get to have a doctor validate it for them though if you get sick the very next day after your clean bill of health, I'm pretty sure you'll hear a different tune), and they add to a list of meaningless coverages that are REPLACING real health insurance coverage for the cost of needed medical services.

Do I think anyone will really ask how wellness programs are a reasonable solution to a problem identified as too much hospital building and the cost of the uninsured? No because we've given up. We can listen to this idiotic explanation and hope that something will change. It will, but not in the near future without some sanity applied to the problem, sanity meaning that every insured ask how do you get from the problem of too many hospitals and uninsureds to a solution that pushes wellness programs for those insured?

And the answer, of course is clear leaving us in the hazy land of rhetorical questions. Health insurers will pay for hospitals and the uninsured with the premium dollars they receive by further reducing your coverage and increasing your cost.