California insurance regulators cleared the way Wednesday for Anthem Blue Cross to implement scaled-back rate hikes after a previous increase was canceled amid an uproar over its size.
Anthem said it intends to put the new rates ”” averaging 14% and as high as 20% ”” into effect Oct. 1 for nearly 800,000 individual California policyholders.
Regulators also allowed one of Anthem’s nonprofit competitors, Blue Shield of California, to move ahead with rate increases ”” averaging 19% and as high as 29% ”” for 250,000 individual policyholders.
This is most excellent. Over a million exceedingly annoyed voters going into the mid-term elections.
What a joke: non-profit health insurers. Highmark Blue Cross in Pittsburgh is set to drop the hammer again – the company that has a 5 billion dollar surplus; the company that over three years has raised the rates on its Medicare Supplemental Plan from 50 to 100% in anticipation of the implementation of this year’s Corporate Profit Maintenance and Enhancement legislation that some are calling “reform”. SS/DD as we used to say.
It seems like a lot of people assumed that “non-profit” would mean “lower-cost” when it came to insurance. Clearly, that hasn’t worked out quite as expected.
Our Blue Cross rate hikes 15% every year and has for many years now.