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Shame on you, Mother Blue

Posted on January 21, 2010 by Staff

Bill Sommers

Recently, unsuspecting N.C. residents have found their mailboxes awash with Blue Cross Blue Shield mailings that shed manufactured crocodile tears on the “horror” of a relatively small public program included in the Obama Health Plan proposal, calling it a “vast expansion in the government’s role,” while praising its own righteous stance for “health care that works.” This mail-order crusade was predicted back in May, when Paul Krugman’s New York Times column “Blue Double Cross” noted that after private insurers had a cooperative photo-op with the president, BCBS of North Carolina, among others, began “gearing up for a major smear campaign.” And so it has come to pass.

Their insulting insertion of the postcard mailing trick underlines BCBS’s reckless fear that any kind of competition is an attack on its profit margin; it also symbolizes the inability of most private health insurers to contribute to the country’s greater good against the morass of increasingly botched private health care providers and rising insurance premiums. BCBS’s constant misrepresentation of the true goal of a public health-insurance sector has made the United States the negative model for health care when compared to so many developed – and developing – countries. Despite its protestations, BCBS wants to keep that negative model alive and well for as long as it can.

In fact, most of the private insurers like BCBS of North Carolina began raising their rates as Congress started the process of implementing a major overhaul of our failing system. The major reason is the fact that the insurance industry is under pressure from Wall Street to get ahead of any legislative changes that might reduce its profits. Small businesses suffer most from the insurance industry’s greed – of which BCBS is a significant part. One small businessman in Columbia, Pa., for example, was told by his current insurance carrier that his workforce was becoming “too old and very expensive” after demanding a 160 percent increase in the company’s coverage.

After receiving the first of the BCBS’s mailings, I wrote to their Durham office complaining about the mailings and the gross inaccuracies included therein. I shortly received a reassuringly bland letter from the project manager of “Member Experience and Customer Satisfaction.” GEE! Among a litany of well-practiced positively stated negative pronouncements, one sentence seemed a summation of attitude and status:

“We think it’s critical that North Carolinians understand how a government-run health plan and increased taxes could impact health coverage costs and choice. That’s why we’re working to educate North Carolinians to do that.”

GEE. Here’s Mother Blue Cross sitting on her Blue Shield telling all her North Carolina children to be quiet and go out and play while Mother Blue takes care of the problem. GEE WHIZ!

But Mother Blue is a bit of a scoundrel. She forgets to tell us that BCBS has for many years been – and currently is –a full participant in the Federal Employees Health Benefits program (FEHB), a government-run health plan that is a model of the plan BC/BS decries with such moral fervor. In it, the U.S. government pays between 60 percent and 70 percent of premium costs to the participating insurers – BCBS included – through the budget of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management. Under FEHB, BCBS offers “fee-for-services” plans in eight states, while in a slightly different mode offers HMO health participation in six states.

Well, Mother Blue, how do you justify this immorality to your poor children? On the one hand you tell us that these awful government-run health plans are serious threats to the country while with the other hand – unseen to your trusting children – you are taking funds from the U.S. government hand over fist?

PLEASE!

Bill Sommers, a Fearrington Village resident, is a regular contributor to Chatham County Line, where this column first appeared.

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