The strange thing is that my health insurance premium goes up at least once a year. The rate increase is foreshadowed by the arrival of several pages of sheer bullshit in the mail. What motivates me to read the text is as corrupt as the industry itself: I feel guilty for my participation in PR and marketing tactics designed – or ‘executed’ – to sell technology. I feel guilty, that is, until I read what the wordsmiths over at Regence BlueCross BlueShield of Oregon are willing to commit to paper. They are all about serving me, I am told. They are all about my health, my well-being, my comfort and joy. I don’t have the courage to figure it out precisely, but as long as I’ve had my policy each and every rate increase has been by at least 20 percent. I’m not a math expert, but my assumption is that if we continue along at the rate that’s apparently standard operating procedure, my monthly payment to my health insurance “provider” will, in three years, achieve a 100 percent increase over what it was two years ago. In other words, it will have doubled.
I haven’t written any letters about it, or gone to any demonstrations, or even written about it on this blog. That’s because I’m resigned to it, and that resignation is due to a couple of facts I discovered recently, facts that are not at all hidden but right out there in public for us all to see and enjoy.
The first is that Regence BlueCross BlueShield of Oregon is – are you ready for this? – in words copied and pasted directly from its Web site, “ … a nonprofit health care company.” Does that mean that the company doesn’t pay taxes? Does that mean that my monthly health insurance premiums can be written off as charitable contributions? I have no idea.
The second fact of the matter is that even though the health insurance company I deal with is a nonprofit, and even though the health insurance business in general – as we’ve all heard – is suffering terribly due to the rising costs of modern medicine, I heard not long ago that the CEO of Regence BlueCross BlueShield of Oregon earns more than …
It’s really tricky to make a clear statement about that. I could have sworn I heard something about “a million” but when I did some digging around to confirm or deny, I read a report from 2010 that said the CEO’s Oregon salary was cut by 40 percent. Even by that margin, though, he earned $521,873. But that’s only the beginning. The key term here is “Oregon salary.” The CEO is also paid by the Regence Group health plans in three other states (Idaho, Utah and Washington). While the article I read said that the figures for the take-home pay from those three states wasn’t available when the article was published, it did point out that the previous year’s paycheck from Washington state alone was more than $900,000.
That is one hell of a nonprofit they’re running down there on the banks of the Willamette.
Anyhow, the company went before a commission in Oregon to petition for permission to increase premiums for holders of individual policies – that is me – by 22 percent starting in August. One of the most interesting things I read in the articles about the hearings was that the ‘membership’ for Regence in Oregon is at record lows. Without having any data to back myself up, I’d say that there’s a pretty good chance that the reason for declining ‘membership’ is that many people cannot afford to absorb double-digit increases for already inflated premiums each and every year. So to make up for it, they now want to raise the premiums more? That makes no sense whatsoever to me, but I do not, dear reader, have a marketing degree.
I may or may not shop around for some other insurance company. I’ll have to figure that out when the time comes. For now, I’m just having a little fun writing nasty notes on the MEMO line of the checks with which I pay my monthly premium. I have to start somewhere, and that beautifully blank line at the lower left corner of the check seems as good a place as any.
