The Rhode Island Small Business Healthcare Plan

In today’s Projo, Felice J. Freyer describes a new small business/individual health insurance blueprint unveiled yesterday by the Rhode Island Office of the Health Insurance Commissioner

Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Rhode Island and UnitedHealthcare of New England are required, starting in May, to offer a “wellness health benefit plan” to individuals and businesses with 50 or fewer employees. The plan has to meet the state’s criteria and the average premium can’t exceed 10 percent of the average Rhode Island wage….
The new plan’s deductible will be about $500, with out-of-pocket costs capped at $3,000 — provided the enrollee signs a pledge promising to choose a primary-care physician, undergo a health-risk appraisal, either maintain a healthy weight or participate in weight-management programs, either remain smoke-free or participate in smoking cessation programs, and participate in disease-management programs if applicable. In the first year, subscribers will be asked just to promise these things; in the second year, they will have to prove participation.
Someone who didn’t want to sign such a pledge could still buy the plan but he or she would face a $3,000 deductible and out-of-pocket costs up to $6,000 a year.
The program’s concepts are stunningly unoriginal, consisting of nothing more than…
  1. Price controls on the amount insurance companies can charge employees of small businesses, and
  2. Government regulation of individual behavior that will hopefully lead to individuals consuming less insurance.
Why didn’t someone think of this before; we can prevent healthcare costs from rising just by having the state order them to stop rising!
Seriously, there are at least 3 problems with the plan…
  1. A fixed-price formula divorced from actual costs of providing healthcare could eventually drive health insurers out of the state. There is recent precedent for this. An irrational regulatory structure forced most workers’ compensation insurers to pull out of Rhode Island in the early 1990s because they were required to pay out more money than pricing regulations allowed them to collect. There is no reason that the same thing couldn’t eventually happen to health insurance.
  2. The partcular mechanism for implementing the “wellness” program sets a dangerous precedent. It is wrong for government to use its power to demand that interaction between individuals occur only on the government’s terms. It is not hard to imagine a future where, for example, attendance at the sex-education program of the government’s choice, chosen with as much political input as medical input, is made a pre-requisite of getting lower insurance rates on a family plan. (I chose the sex-education example because liberals, conservatives and everyone in-between should be able to envision a potential problem here.)
  3. Finally, it will never make sense to pay for “wellness” programs through an insurance-type system. Insurance assumes that many people pay into a pool of money, while only a few take monies out to pay for unexpected emergencies. But usage of “wellness” care will not be occurring on an infrequent, emergency basis. Ideally, the wellness program will be utilized by many people at regular intervals. This means that paying for wellness care through an insurance program will be always be less cost-effective than paying doctors for wellness care directly, sans any middleman. (Of course, if people start paying their doctors directly, they will never develop a sense that their visits to a doctor are a government-provided entitlement, making the government seem a little less powerful, creating an impression that strong-government advocates would prefer to avoid.)
This plan is an example of the government’s ability to take separate ideas which have individual merit and ruin them by putting them together in a way that focuses on increasing bureaucratic power rather than creating effective public policy. A better implementation of the “wellness” concept in the Rhode Island plan would be…
  1. Implementing some sort of community rating system, ala the Wyden plan, so people can buy insurance independent of their employer,
  2. Modifying the community rating system so that insurers can modify their rates based on certain types of behavior (participating in a wellness program, not smoking, etc.), and
  3. Creating health-savings accounts that people can use to pay for their routine and “wellness” care.
Through this set of proposals, you can provide wellness incentives and get individuals thinking about their own care, without invoking a government threat to deny medical access to those who do not behave “correctly”.

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Greg
Greg
17 years ago

I wonder where the ACLU comes down on this? Will they defend my right to smoke and eat cheeseburgers and not get charged a higher rate than the health nut?

Tom W
Tom W
17 years ago

This is what inevitably occurs once you make something a “government responsibility.”
Individual liberty gets eroded in direct proportion to government involvement, which in turn has a natural inclination to grow: 1) government gets involved and makes the problem worse (e.g., Medicare and Medicaid), so 2) the government solution is to add more government, which 3) brings us back to 1, and the cycle continues.
Where oh where in either the U.S. or Rhode Island Constitutions does it say ANYTHING about health care being a government responsbility?????

Greg
Greg
17 years ago

I still don’t understand how health insurance is a government responsibility but homeowners and auto insurance ISN’T. What’s the difference?

Anthony
Anthony
17 years ago

C-O-M-P-E-T-I-T-I-O-N
That is what is needed in Rhode Island. You have Blue Cross, United and….? Hmm…
I’m disappointed that the Carcieri administration did not embrace a free-market approach. State funded public health programs in RI under Carcieri’s predecessor were perhaps the biggest cause of our state’s deficits. In fact, Koller was the head of Neighborhood Health Plan.
Now after screwing up the government version, the response is to force a government solution onto the private sector. This is the latest of many steps towards government control of healthcare.
I fear that we are setting up a system that may be doomed to fail. The insurers have already said that many of the savings that the state hopes to realize won’t occur until years from now, if at all. Are we just setting ourselves up for increased goverment intervention down the road?
Look at what has happened in the past with government intervention. RI increased health benefits over several years only to yank them after people came to rely on the benefits. Didn’t we just have this debate over mental health cuts. When Carcieri announced the original cuts in health-related areas, I supported them as necessary to improve the state’s financial situation. But it truly is a crime not to cut healthcare programs without provide those needing help an alternative outside of government.
We’re on the road to doing this with healthcare in RI. We should be looking to provide citizens with MORE healthcare options, not fewer healthcare options. That requires increasing competition among insurers. Blue Cross might not like it, but it’s the way to ensure the long-term healthcare needs of our state.

Greg
Greg
17 years ago

Wow, Anthony went an entire post without blaming Laffey for something.

Anthony
Anthony
17 years ago

Greg,
I only blame Laffey when he is to blame.

Emily Harding
17 years ago

You are all correct. This new plan won’t help a BIT. If the TRUTH BE TOLD, Rhode Island needs to RADICALLY OVERHAUL its entire legislative and regulatory foundation for the health insurance industry here in the state. It needs to TAKE THE ADVICE OF PROVEN NATIONAL HEALTH POLICY EXPERTS that know what they are doing and have a TRACK RECORD to show for it. Actually The Rhode Island chapter of the National Association of Health Underwriters has already contacted the experts that helped certain other floundering states get back on track and restore their markets by helping to craft GOOD legislation that was SUPPORTED BY STATE OFFICIALS and had the effect of BRINGING HEALTH INSURERS BACK to their states in a matter of months once passed….and it dramatically LOWERED HEALTH INSURANCE COSTS and IMPROVED AVAILABILITY of a WIDER CHOICE of AFFORDABLE plans and REDUCED the numbers of uninsured. Actually, the work has already been done but our esteemed Rhode Island leaders decided to RESIST, IGNORE or outright REJECT these reforms for the past two years! These are reforms that would have ended our crisis as long as three years ago and cut our helth insurance costs by a had to 2/3s for some people. The majority of the rest of the country proves day in and day out that GOOD legislation brings carriers to states and enables the market to function. Carriers are more profitable and consumers have more lower cost quality plans to choose from. But Rhode Island has never looked to the successful states as models for reform. They continue to look to states that are just as crippled (and stubborn and arrogant)as we are. By allowing our officials to continue to try to do their own thing and reinvent the wheel, I promise. Things are only going… Read more »

Anthony
Anthony
17 years ago

VERY well said Emily. Governor Carcieri has spoken about increasing the number of carriers in the past, but for some reason his administration seems to be moving in a different direction. Why is that?

Phil
17 years ago

The apparent blog hysteria directed at this plan is completely unwarranted. First, the Plan, as proposed, is directed to the small business community and is an option, not a requirement. There is no government requirement stating that a small business has to offer the plan, or that the employees of the small business offering the plan (as an option) have to participate. Additionally, the Plan was designed by members of the RI small business community who run small businesses, including direct payees, and leaders of small business organizations such as Chambers of Commerce. Chris Koller and his group functioned primarily as facilitators to address the challenge provided to his department by the Legislature. The premium targets were set by the Legislature. The Plan was designed by the small business community, in reaction to rapidly rising health care costs that threaten to survival of their businesses. Writer comments belie a complete ignorance of the RI governments current involvement in health insurance. There are over 40 mandates, established by the legislature, that have to be offered by health care providers. Emily is evidently unaware the Senator Elizabeth Roberts (soon to be LG Roberts) has proposed a bill (Jan.06) to offer tax credits to small businesses that offer Wellness programs. The small group Wellness component of the Plan was modeled on lower cost success stories from the Wellness model applied at the big business (large group) level. No data exists that indicates that a wellness component will ultimately result in cost savings in a small group, but it’s certainly worth a try. Also, the Wellness component of the Plan promotes individual responsibility, as opposed to government intrusion into lifestyle choices. Simply put, if an individual decides to participate in a healthy lifestyle, via smoking cessation or weight reduction, etc., that individual will pay… Read more »

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