Understanding WellPoint: why ginormous rate increases are inevitable in our current health care system

Only one thing shocks me about WellPoint’s 38 percent rate hike to health insurance policyholders: I ’m shocked that people are shocked by it. The fact that WellPoint raised premium rates that much all at once? No, that doesn’t shock me at all. That’s just WellPoint acting like a business. That’s what businesses do. They determine how much profit they want to make, what to charge in order to make those margins, and what their terms are for doing business. As long as people are willing and able to pay, everything is dandy.

In WellPoint’s case, they’ve lost a lot of healthy customers who paid premiums but seldom submitted claims. In a lean economy, some of these consumers decided to roll the dice and go without coverage. My husband calls it “riding bareback.” Paying the mortgage or buying groceries became more important, especially if some or all of the income that supported premiums has been lost.

That leaves WellPoint with lots of customers who can’t be without coverage. Lots of unhealthy people, lots of claims, less profit. Meanwhile, the cost of care itself is rising. Without insurance, people pay for health care at rates that are scary enough to wake the dead. Remember, they don’t have the clout of an insurance company to negotiate rates for services, so they pay at the Mercedes Benz rate for all health care. When they go through all of their assets (homes, cars, savings and retirement accounts) they are finished.

That’s where you and I step in. Their health care costs (now and later) are built into the cost of our care. Hospitals and doctors must charge more to help make up the difference. WellPoint must charge more to make its profit margins. Anyway, that’s our free market system at work. Love it or hate it, but don’t be outraged when it works the way it’s designed to work.

Why can’t we see that everyone has a dog in this hunt? Today’s employers have a struggle that’s comparable to the individual consumer in finding affordable health care coverage for employees. That’s especially true for small businesses. As an employee, you usually pay just a fraction of the premium. A generous employer gets the full brunt of it. Believe me, lots of employers are struggling to offer health insurance coverage at rates that both employee and employer can afford. Who can look at the state of the auto industry in our country and not see the demise of employer-sponsored health care?

Most people are just one job loss or health event away from knowing how the health care system does and doesn’t work in our country. As a self-employed couple, my husband and I have been seeing annual increases of 20 to 25 percent for a long time. These increases no longer shock us. We’re just glad to be covered by group insurance where that’s all they can do—pass on increases they feel they need for our group to remain profitable. If we were in the unhappy individual market for insurance, purchasing without the clout of a group, we might find that no one even wanted to cover us. Yeah.

Here’s why: insurance is, by definition, designed to cover unknown risks—not known risks. By the time a person reaches 50, they are bound to have at least a few health issues. When you buy individual coverage, you get to share your entire medical history with the prospective insurer. The insurance provider gets to decide if they’d like to have you as a customer, what to charge and what to cover based on that medical history. Unlike group coverage, the insurer also decides when they no longer deem you a worthwhile customer. They can send you packing. Nifty, huh? Good luck finding coverage after that happens. Personally, we’ve never been brave enough to play ball in this arena, although we're savvy enough to know that we might have to one of these days.

Whether we’re talking about group or individual health care coverage, we must remember one thing: insurance is a for-profit business. When we decide that we don’t want government involved in our health care, then we give ourselves over to a for-profit system. Health care choices get made by people who make or lose money based on their business decisions. It puzzles me that we are unperturbed about for-profit organizations deciding what health care we can have, but we are outraged about pooling our money in a not-for-profit or government-run health care system.

In any system, someone has to make choices about what’s covered. It’s the only way to make the math work because no system can cover the world and everything adjacent to it. Don’t hate WellPoint for doing what businesses do. Just think about whether you are okay with that method of handling health care for you and your neighbor, in sickness and in health.

Here are five books for understanding the very complicated question of what to do about health care.

The Tyranny of Dead Ideas: Letting Go of the Old Ways of Thinking to Unleash a New Prosperity, by Matt Miller http://www.mattmilleronline.com/tyranny.php

Health Care Reform Now!: A Prescription for Change, by George Halvorson and John J. Nance

How Reform Went Wrong: Health Care Reform in the U.S., Past and Present, by Michael E. Porter and Elizabeth Olmsted Teisberg

Health Care Reform that Makes Sense: A Detailed Plan to Improve the Health Care System by America's Leading Health Care CEO, by Alan B. Miller

When the Good Pensions Go Away: Why Americans Need a New Deal for Pension and Health Care Reform, by Thomas Mackel

This Valentine's Day, take a lesson in self-care from your heart

Sacred scriptures tell us to love our neighbor as ourselves. But how can we do a good job of loving our neighbors, when we really don’t love ourselves very well? Taking care of our minds, our bodies and our spirits isn’t vain or selfish. The reality is that we can’t serve others from an empty cart. When we truly love ourselves, we find it more difficult to hurt other people, and easier to help others. Love for self is ultimately love for all.

In Nischala Joy Devi’s book, The Secret Power of Yoga, Devi says the best lesson on self-care is taken directly from the body and its heart. The heart pumps and distributes oxygenated blood faithfully, day in, day out, all through the body. Part of the body’s built-in wisdom is that the heart is always the first beneficiary of the newest, freshest oxygenated blood. That’s because the heart knows that it must care for itself first in order to fulfill its purpose to the body. It is sort of like the safety instructions we get from airlines when we fly: in an emergency, put on your own oxygen mask before attempting to help children or other dependents.

When we don’t care for ourselves lovingly, sometimes our bodies, minds and spirits send us an urgent memo. Yoga encourages better care of all our essential parts because it allows us to develop the habit of noticing what is going on long before our bodies, minds or spirits declare a state of emergency. When we feel tension, anxiety, physical pain, confusion, or lack of clarity, we can combine our faith with a regular yoga practice to meet these symptoms at their source and bring whatever ails us into better balance.

Here are a few great affirmations to encourage more love in your life.

I build my life on a foundation of love.

Love sets my priorities and helps order my steps.

When in doubt, I always choose the path that leads to love.

The tide of my love is unstoppable. It flows in and out without fail.

The Preface: appetizer or entrée?

I hesitate to suggest this, but have you ever considered reading the preface in lieu of the whole book? Once upon a time, I viewed a preface as nothing more than a dull obstacle that kept me from diving into a book right away. I knew in my heart that they were supposed to be like an appetizer to a great meal, whetting the appetite for more. But with limited time to read, who had time for it? Just take me straight to the meat and potatoes.

Today, I think just the opposite. With limited time to read and a very broad appetite for books, a well-written preface or foreword may serve as a gourmet meal unto itself. As proof, this week I polished off three prefaces for books I have no intention of reading—at least not entirely.

The first is Otto Penzler’s witty set-up for The Lineup: The World’s Greatest Crime Writers Tell the Inside Story of Their Greatest Detectives. In it, Penzler offers the complete story on the concept for this book, originally conceived as a tourniquet for his hemorrhaging New York City bookstore, The Mysterious Bookshop. As the title implies, each novelist gives readers an account of what makes a character tick. It should come as no surprise that the world’s greatest crime novelists approach this task in their own distinct ways.

I have absolutely no interest in crime novels, but this book was a fascination to my husband, who thrives on the likes of Robert Parker and Michael Connelly. To his credit, my darling spouse has a keen eye on the sort of writing that does interest me. If it weren’t for his recommendation, I might have missed this treat. What makes Penzler’s preface main-course reading is his apt and humorous analysis of the current condition of reading and the publishing industry in the United States. Read it and weep. Read it and laugh. Pathetic and funny all at the same time.

The second and third (yes, a book that required not one, but TWO forewords) were written for Elena Kostioukovitch’s tomb, Why Italians Love to Talk About Food. Foreword writers Carol Field and Umberto Eco each explain how Italian food, culture, and history intersect in ways that are esoteric to most Americans. They introduce the author as our ideal guide to Italian culture—one who is up to the task of explaining the unusual connection between Italians and their food due to her rare blend of objectivity and immersion.

I’m not sure I will be up for fully digesting Kostioukovitch’s complete journey, but the ruminations of these two writers have given me more appreciation than I had. While it’s not as much as I’d get from the whole book, it’s probably more than I would have had if I’d never picked up the book and snacked on it. So, read those forewords and prefaces. Let them serve as whatever course you most enjoy, appetizer, entrée or dessert.

The saga of the IMA Blog Contest continues

A divine lunar lesson unfolds

Without the dense clouds that hovered over Indianapolis, I would have seen a full moon on my way home from dinner last night. Never mind the overcast skies. I still felt its brilliance. As sure as the moon needs the sun’s light in order to shine, last night the Creator of all that’s good gave me a not-so-subtle reminder that life is one continuous strand of unmerited blessings and favors, most of which we can’t fully appreciate until much later. I took it as a nudge to acknowledge my dependence on divine gifts, to remember that I am always right where I should be, and to know with certainty that the Almighty is in charge of everything. Here’s evidence to wit.

I ventured out in an arctic blast last night to attend a yoga class that will count as a requirement toward my eventual certification as a yoga instructor. When I arrived for class, I discovered that the instructor I hoped to observe was detained by work. Swallowing my disappointment, I spread my mat and met his substitute, a lovely woman who welcomed me and asked if I’m a regular in the class. I introduced myself, sat down, and waited for class to start.

The woman next to me overheard our conversation and quietly asked, “What did you say your name is?”

“Crystal,” I answered.

“Do you know who I am?” she asked.

She looked familiar. But I’ve moved around a lot and I'm always meeting people who remind me of someone I once knew. I began sorting through a mental database of friends and co-workers. There was a flash of recognition, but I couldn’t wrap my mind around the possibility of it. “I’m Brenda,” she said. In just a heartbeat, I felt as if the doors of my life were flung wide open and I could see down a long corridor that led right back to the start.

Who is Brenda and why does she matter to me? Let me count the ways: 1) I might be a college dropout today if it weren't for Brenda. 2) She loaned me a bed from her guest room when I moved into my first apartment with nothing more than clothes and a few pieces of silverware. 3) She opened a window on a world so vast that I began to trust life might hold more possibility than my 19-year-old imagination could fathom.

Brenda was responsible for guiding me toward a major when I had no idea what to do with my life. As a confused college sophomore, I had briefly considered dropping out of school. At the time, all I could see was the money my parents were wasting while I muddled through, trying to figure out who I was and what I could be. She was just a few years older than I, but Brenda was legions wiser and she used that wisdom to mentor me, convincing me that I could write. She showed me how I could make a living at that.

Brenda was responsible for helping me get a job as an undergraduate assistant when I had no qualifications or skills. How could she see any potential in someone who was so incompetent and naïve? Where did she find the patience to train me? The money I earned provided pocket change when tuition, books, and room and board were semester by semester miracles for my middle-class family.

During my sophomore year, she used her influence as a graduate assistant to send me and another student to a speech contest in Laguna Beach, California. Accompanied by Brenda, Dennis and I saw the Pacific Ocean, tasted really good coffee and dined on fine cuisine, all for the first time. Before that trip, neither Dennis nor I had ever ventured beyond our small-town, mid-western existence. He was demonstrably unimpressed by California. To me, the trip was far more than a speech competition. It was a breathtaking window on a world full of promise.

After last night’s class, Brenda invited me to join her and a group of her yoga buddies for dinner. It’s been almost three decades since I lost track of her, but I have never forgotten her wit, sense of humor, wisdom, and kindness, all of which are still very much in tact.

She was there last night only because her friend was the class substitute teacher. I was there only because my husband was out of town and I thought it was a good opportunity to catch a class. The gift of our reunion last night was no fluke. It was an affirmation that we can never know how much our life may matter to another person.

Here was the divine lunar lesson delivered for my edification and yours:

• When someone in your life is confused, share your wisdom.
• When someone in your life has lost faith in self, believe in them.
• When someone in your life will benefit from it, use your influence.
• When someone in your life has need, share your resources and material possessions. 
• And finally, when you have the chance, be totally grateful for all the people in your life who have bestowed those things on you.

Thank you, Brenda, for making a huge difference in my life.