Major Insurance Company Faces Lawsuit For Allegedly Tricking Customers Into Canceling Their Policies

[kentuck]

http://thinkprogress.org/health/2013/11/07/2906861/major-insurance-company-lawsuit/

<snip>

A major California insurance company is being sued by two consumers alleging that they were tricked into dropping their health coverage when they could have remained on their preferred plans under Obamacare, the Los Angeles Times reports.

Obamacare allows insurance policies that were issued before the law was signed in 2010 to remain in place as long as they don’t change their benefits in a way that harms consumers, such as by increasing their out-of-pocket costs or dropping benefits. Customers who have these so-called “grandfathered plans” can keep them for however long the insurance company continues to offer it.

For customers who don’t have “grandfathered plans,” things are a little different. Their insurance providers must comply with Obamacare’s more robust benefit requirements. Some companies have been canceling millions of individual policies either in an effort to meet those new requirements, or because they want to change the plans in a way that would make them illegal under the health law. Most customers who shop for new individual policies under Obamacare will be eligible for tax subsidies to help them afford their coverage.

California’s Anthem Blue Cross may have convinced their customers that they fall into the second category — even though they’re actually in the first.

.....more

[Newsjock]

1. More Anthem antics in the news

Anthem Blue Cross Reassigns 33,000 Californians To New Doctors
http://www.capradio.org/articles/2013/11/06/anthem-blue-cross-reassigns-33,000-californians-to-new-doctors/

Thirty-three thousand people in Anthem Blue Cross HMO plans are receiving letters reassigning them to new doctors starting January 1st of next year.

The insurance company says the change has nothing to do with the Affordable Care Act.

... But Sutter Health says the reassignment letters were unnecessary.

It says it hopes to reach a contract with the insurer by the end of the year.

[Scuba]

2. For-profit health insurance executive as mass murderers, so what's a little fraud?

[indepat]

3. Bet the shrill right-wing shills will ring out their blame of BHO for this alleged corporate

chicanery.

[ProSense]

4. Will this story go viral like the BS claims?

Time to Investigate Those Insurance Company Letters

Paul Waldman

October 29, 2013

Are they trying to pull a fast one on their customers?

As a follow-up to this post, I want to talk about the thing that spawns some of these phony Obamacare victim stories: the letters that insurers are sending to people in the individual market. People all over the country are getting these letters, which say "We're cancelling your current policy because of the new health-care law. Here's another policy you can get for much more money." Reporters are doing stories about these people and their terrifying letters without bothering to check what other insurance options are available to them.

There's something fishy going on here, not just from the reporters, but from the insurance companies. It's time somebody did a detailed investigation of these letters to find out just what they're telling their customers. Because they could have told them, "As a result of the new health-care law, your plan, StrawberryCare, has now been changed to include more benefits. The premium is going up, just as your premium has gone up every year since forever." But instead, they're just eliminating those plans entirely and offering people new plans. If the woman I discussed from that NBC story is any indication, what the insurance company is offering is something much more expensive, even though they might have something cheaper available. They may be taking the opportunity to try to shunt people into higher-priced plans. It's as though you get a letter from your car dealer saying, "That 2010 Toyota Corolla you're leasing has been recalled. We can supply you with a Toyota Avalon for twice the price." They're not telling you that you can also get a 2013 Toyota Corolla for something like what you're paying now.

I'm not sure that's what's happening, and it may be happening only with some insurers but not others. But with hundreds of thousands of these letters going out and frightening people into thinking they have no choice but to sign up for a much more expensive plan, it's definitely something someone should look into. Like, say, giant news organizations with lots of money and resources.

Now, it should be said that when President Obama said during the debate over the Affordable Care Act in Congress that if you like your health coverage you can keep it, he was only half right. The reason he repeated it so many times was that he and his advisors firmly believed that one of the main reasons Bill Clinton's health-care reform failed was that it changed things too much for too many, and people fear change. In Clinton's plan, pretty much everybody not on Medicare or Medicaid would have had to go into a new insurance plan. That those plans might be better than what they had didn't matter; the idea frightened people. So the Obama administration took pains to emphasize that the government would not require anyone to change their insurance. That didn't mean they were guaranteeing that no insurance company would ever make changes to anyone's plan, because insurance companies do that all the time. But the law wouldn't mandate that, say, you leave Aetna and join Blue Cross.

- more -

http://prospect.org/article/time-investigate-those-insurance-company-letters

Think Progress debunked NBC's report on insurance cancellations, and there is more
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10023942430

[kentuck]

5. Instead of apologizing, the President should be asking the Justice Dept to investigate...

in my opinion.