…Mrs. [Angela] Braly says. “We really do have to get at the underlying question of health-care costs.”
That was the core promise of ObamaCare. Overall health costs for people insured by WellPoint increased by 8.9% in 2009 alone, and arresting this climb was the reason so many industry groups, not only the insurers, joined with the White House and Democrats. Nobody thinks the status quo is a success. But as Mrs. Braly notes ruefully, “The nature of health care is very complex, and sometimes the nature of politics is very simple.”
The tragedy, as she sees it, is what “a wasted opportunity” it all turned out to be. “Health-care reform” soon became “health-insurance reform” exclusively. “It was a pivot that was””unfortunate,” she says, “because it is not going to solve the longer-term problem.”
It’s hard to see how WellPoint could be to blame for surging health spending, Mrs. Braly says, when 85 cents out of every premium dollar or more “is paid out in the actual cost of care, doctors, hospitals, suppliers, drugs, devices.” Confiscating the 2009 profits of the entire insurance industry would pay for two days of U.S. health care.