Editorial: Sen. Dianne Feinstein fighting outrageous health ...

Thirty-three states have laws regulating insurance rates. Private insurers have had ample opportunity to get behind fair regulation in California to allow reasonable rate increases and profits, but they have fought it at every turn. Instead, for years they have been pounding customers with double-digit rate increases far beyond the rise in medical costs and raking in record profits.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein has the solution for the 17 states lacking the authority to block or modify egregious rate increases. She is proposing to give the secretary of Health and Human Services power to examine health insurance premiums and deny unjustified or excessive rate hikes. Congress should pass Feinstein's bill, and if it doesn't, Californians should protect their own interests with a ballot proposition planned in 2014.

The latest outrage is Blue Shield of California's plan to raise rates by as much as 19.9 percent for an estimated 265,000 of its policyholders. State Insurance Commissioner Dave Jones last week blasted the request as unreasonable, but that's about all he can do. First as a state senator and now as insurance commissioner, Jones has tried to give California the power to rein in abusive health insurance companies. But insurers' aggressive lobbying and a core of mostly Republican backers in Sacramento have blocked him.

Blue Shield isn't the only culprit; Aetna has announced plans to increase rates for about 20,000 of its policyholders by 11.4 percent. Remember, it was Aetna's 40 percent rate increase in California in 2010 that President Barack Obama cited as a principal reason for his national health care reforms.

Medical costs are increasing at nowhere near the pace insurers want Californians to believe. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services reported in January that overall U.S. health care spending grew 3.9 percent in 2011. That's the third consecutive year of record low levels of growth.

Feinstein points out that from 2008 to 2011, in one of the nation's worst economic downturns, profits of the five largest for-profit health insurance companies increased by 61 percent.

Americans have a lot more to do to control medical costs long-term. But that's no excuse for health insurance companies to gouge policyholders for outrageous profits.

If Congress doesn't, California must.

- San Jose Mercury News

Source: http://www.presstelegram.com/opinions/ci_22784991/editorial-feinstein-fighting-outrageous-health-insurance-rate-hikes

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