Pre-existing conditions and profit-taking: the causes of our healthcare problems

Elisabeth Rosenthal, the editor-in-chief of Kaiser Health News and author of “An American Sickness” (discussed in this blog on April 15, 2017, United Airlines, health care, and a system designed to privilege the powerful) has an op-ed in her old newspaper, the New York Times, on May 29, 2017 titled “We all have pre-existing conditions”. That is a good and accurate title, but a little different from the print title “The cost of pre-existing conditions”.  That cost is high, to the people with those conditions, and less obviously, to the overall society. This includes their families and friends, of course, but also their employers. When a potentially treatable condition excludes you from having health insurance, you are less likely to get it treated, and more likely to get sick and miss work. The spectrum of conditions that insurance companies used in the pre-ACA era to exclude people was broad. Rosenthal notes specific examples including having had an abnormal Pap smear, a history of being on anti-depressants, a history of taking thyroid medication, and being on post-menopausal hormone treatment. Of course, once you are excluded and have no insurance, you don’t seek care for other conditions either, either pre-existing or those that develop later or might have not been recognized. Not only could insurers exclude you for having a pre-existing condition, but there was no regulation of what or how significant that condition had to be. We have heard stories of people being denied treatment for cancer because, on signing up, they had “failed to report” a pre-existing history of treatment for things as minor as an ingrown toenail or acne!

The ACA, also known as Obamacare, changed that. It eliminated the ability of insurance companies to exclude people based on their pre-existing conditions, thus rendering moot the question of what conditions could be excluded. It also prevented those insurance companies from charging more money to people with those pre-existing conditions by requiring “community rating”; they had to set their rates based upon the overall actuarial risk of the entire community in which they sell insurance. The same principle is why those of us who receive our health insurance via employers, especially large employers, usually have lower rates for better coverage – because the risk pool is everyone who works for that company, and while many are sick, many more are younger and healthier (after all, this excludes all the people who are not working). Thus, the requirement that the individual policies sold under ACA had to be based on the community rating was critical for many Americans to be able to get even close to affordable health insurance.

For many, the cost on the individual marketplace was still too high. For those whose pre-existing conditions had previously made them unable to get insurance, it was often still a boon. For those who were younger and healthier, though, who had had cheaper policies or gone without coverage altogether, they now had to pay more. After all, community rating means an average, so those at lower risk will pay more than they would have with individual rating, and certainly more than with no insurance since the ACA had the “individual mandate” requiring them to get coverage. The bigger problem is that in some geographic areas, many (or most or in some cases all) insurers decided that the benefit of offering insurance (i.e., making money) was not worth the risk of paying out for actual medical care. This is especially true in rural areas, where low population density and a higher proportion of older and therefore sicker people make for a poor risk/return ratio.

The problem, of course, for those younger and healthier people who chose to forgo coverage or, after the individual mandate, to buy the cheapest and crappiest policies, is that they can get sick. They can discover that they have cancer, whatever their age. Or get into a car accident, requiring many surgeries and long treatment and rehabilitation (did they have car insurance?). Or be burned in a fire started by smoking (did they have homeowner’s insurance? Did they opt to not pay the higher premiums that they can legally be charged for being smokers?) Or they can have a premature baby that needs treatment in a neonatal ICU.  Or, particularly for the older group who knew they had a problem like hypertension, diabetes, or arthritis but were hoping they’d stay relatively asymptomatic, they can have a downturn – have a stroke or a heart attack or a serious infection or pain so bad that they can no longer work. And then they find that the “affordable” (i.e., crappy) health insurance that they bought is almost as bad as none.

So we have a conundrum. To work, health insurance has to include everyone, the sick as well as the healthy. But the healthy, especially those with lower incomes, don’t want to pay what seems to be the unfairly high rates that they have to in order for the whole system to be fair. The older and less healthy may want health insurance, but still be dissuaded by the high premiums. The sick need the coverage, but again, without the healthier paying in, the cost for them is too high, and results in either their being unable to afford it or the insurers being unwilling to cover them even if it means leaving an entire market.

Let’s look at some facts:
1.      The US spends more on health care than any other county, by far.
2.      The US has, on a population basis, worse health outcomes than most other developed countries, far worse than many.

This is the true conundrum. How can we pay so much for so little? It is because we pay an enormous percent of our “health care” expenses for drug company (and drug “middlemen”, pharmacy benefits managers) profits, insurance company profits, and income for for-profit and function-like-for-profit non-profit hospitals. As documented by Eric Lipton and Katie Thomas in the May 29, 2017 Times (“Drug lobbyists’ battle cry over prices: blame the others”), there is plenty of blame to go around! In addition, the percent that is actually spent on health care on treatments (and sometimes cures) is primarily for far advanced disease, not prevention and early diagnosis and treatment. We spend almost nothing on public health and prevention.

We keep telling ourselves lies (our healthcare system is the best in the world, the ACA is the problem, drug companies need to charge so much because they spend so much on research and development, etc.) but fewer and fewer of us are believing it. Many of the people who are worst affected voted for Donald Trump and for Republican congressmen who have devised the AHCA (American Health Care Act) that will “solve” the problem by essentially eliminating health insurance coverage for 23 million Americans, 14 million in the first year alone, according to estimates by the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO). The AHCA is basically a tax-cut-for-the-1% bill, with the money coming from the health care coverage for the rest of us.

Is there any way out of this conundrum? Yes. We have the money, obviously; we are spending it. Fifty percent of health care spending is already government, 60% if you include the lost taxes from the employer portion of health insurance. We make the community being rated everyone in the US. We all have one health plan. We are all covered. We all get all necessary services. We don’t lose coverage by leaving or jobs for any reason, from family needs to an entrepreneurial start-up. The old and vulnerable among us are covered and have their needs met, and the healthy among us win by staying healthy and having coverage when we need it. We pay for it by eliminating the profit centers, and not by cutting taxes on the wealthiest of us.

It can be done. It has been done. In every other developed country. We have the resources to do it here. We must need to stand up to the entrenched and powerful profiteers.