Plan with low rate hikes for health coverage has fewer choices

[eridani]

http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2011/03/08/plan_with_low_rate_hikes_for_health_coverage_has_fewer_choices/

At a time when most health insurance companies are raising premiums by 10 percent or more, the Group Insurance Commission, which insures about 185,000 state employees and their families, last week showed them all up by limiting 2011 increases to just an average 2.4 percent.

But to achieve that goal, the GIC is counting on thousands of subscribers to give up their present plans for much cheaper ones that limit their choices of doctors and medical facilities.

The GIC has offered limited-network plans for years, but fewer than 10,000 of GIC?s 350,000 members have joined so far. Last year, the GIC added new limited-network plans offered by Harvard Pilgrim Community Health and Tufts Health Plan, but those plans, too, attracted limited interest.

To help jump-start migration to the less costly plans, the GIC, beginning April 9, will require every subscriber to pick from among the GIC?s 19 plans, which include preferred-provider organizations (PPO) that allow wide choice and health maintenance organizations that allow moderate choice but charge higher premiums than the more restrictive limited-network plans.

Any subscriber who fails to designate a plan in the one-month period ending May 9 will be dropped from their present plan and automatically enrolled in the cheapest--and most limited-- plan on the GIC menu.

Comment by Don McCanne of PNHP: We keep looking at Massachusetts since it serves as a prototype for national reform under the Affordable Care Act. Under this latest development in Massachusetts, state employees are being shoved intlimited-network plans - significantly limiting their choices of health care professionals and institutions.

One of the primary defects with the insurance exchange model of reform is that emphasizing affordability of health plans rather than health care itself results in a transformation to ever more inferior insurance products.

The goal of reform should not be to take away choices in actual health care, nor to shift more of the costs to those who need health care. Yet those are precisely the trends that we are seeing and will continue to see under a model of competition between private health plans.

Under a single payer national health program we would have free choice of our health care professionals and hospitals, and financial barriers to care would be removed. No wonder that we keep hearing that if (whatever) we're going to end up with single payer. Can hardly wait