Until the 1990's, insurers skimmed only about a nickel on the dollar for their "service," Wendell Potter told me. Potter is the CIGNA insurance company PR man who came in from the cold to tell us about what goes down inside the health insurance gold mine. Today, Potter notes (and I've checked his accuracy), porky operators like AIG have kicked up their Loss Ratio by nearly 500 percent.
The insurers did a lot of that profit hiking by instituting age discrimination in their premiums. That's my horrible pre-existing condition-- I'm over 50 now. My premiums cost an employer 300% more than a 30-something. But it wasn't always that way. Originally it was supposed to be that by getting the business of covering a whole company, the premiums would be the same for all. Premiums paid for those not using much medical service would compensate for those needing more. But big money donations to congressional campaigns managed to shove that aside-- and you get extra-special premium rate hiking once you pass 50-- they jack it up every 5 years after that, to squeeze every last dollar out of employers who dare to keep the oldsters on staff in the last 10 years before the Pirateering Private Insurance Industry loses those victims, oops I mean sub-clients, to Medicare.
So while I appreciate the strategy of adding kids to Medicare because who could deny our children coverage, I definitely want Medicare opened up to those who are over 50 because the giant insurers have clobbered us with age discrimination and we need relief.
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