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from the don't-bite-the-hand-that-feeds dept.
Submitted via IRC for chromas
Insurers Hand Out Cash and Gifts To Sway Brokers Who Sell Employer Health Plans
Human resources directors often rely on independent health insurance brokers to guide them through the thicket of costly and confusing benefit options offered by insurance companies. But what many don't fully realize is how the health insurance industry steers the process through lucrative financial incentives and commissions. Those enticements, critics say, don't reward brokers for finding their clients the most cost-effective options.
Here's how it typically works: Insurers pay brokers a commission for the employers they sign up. That fee is usually a healthy 3 to 6 percent of the total premium. That could be about $50,000 a year on the premiums of a company with 100 people, payable for as long as the plan is in place. That's $50,000 a year for a single client. And as the client pays more in premiums, the broker's commission increases.
Commissions can be even higher, up to 40 or 50 percent of the premium, on supplemental plans that employers can buy to cover employees' dental costs, cancer care or long-term hospitalization.
Those commissions come from the insurers. But the cost is built into the premiums the employer and employees pay for the benefit plan.
Now, layer on top of that the additional bonuses that brokers can earn from some insurers. The offers, some marked "confidential," are easy to find on the websites of insurance companies and broker agencies. But many brokers say the bonuses are not disclosed to employers unless they ask. These bonuses, too, are indirectly included in the overall cost of health plans.
These industry payments can't help but influence which plans brokers highlight for employers, says Eric Campbell, director of research at the University of Colorado Center for Bioethics and Humanities.
"It's a classic conflict of interest," Campbell says.
There's "a large body of virtually irrefutable evidence," Campbell says, that shows drug company payments to doctors influence the way they prescribe. "Denying this effect is like denying that gravity exists." And there's no reason, he says, to think brokers are any different.
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Monday February 25 2019, @07:37PM
Sorry, but I just cannot possibly blame this on the Republicans or on Romney, even though Romney may have proposed a similar thing in Massachusetts. Every single Republican in both the House and Senate voted against Obamacare.
And let's not forget all the wheeling and dealing it took even to gather enough Democrats to vote in favor of this nonsense -- recall stuff like the "Cornhusker Kickback"??
Then recall how Ted Kennedy, great senior member of the Senate died, and one of the most Democratic states in the country (Massachusetts) chose to honor his legacy by sending Scott Brown in a special election, who basically ran solely on platform to be the single vote against Obamacare -- and even then, the Dems found a way to still make it through Congress. It's hard to think of that many moments in history that were anti-democratic (with a small D) to that level.
Nope, nope -- this mess is solely on the head of Democrats, who have enslaved the American people to insurance companies. (And yes, you think that's hyperbolic? What do you call it when you're forced to work in order to pay a private company money whether you like it or not, or else the government will punish you? No, it's not like chattel slavery, but it is a SERIOUS violation of rights, which our beloved Speaker of the House laughed off when asked whether there was a Constitutional issue.)
Yes, I'd vote for single payer in a heartbeat. Yes, I was as vociferous during the debates back around the time of Obamacare -- telling people how single payer was the only solution and this was BS that was going to result in as much or more profits for an unnecessary middleman industry.
The Dems had everything: the House, the Senate, and the Presidency, and they chose to railroad through this piece of crap. SHAME on them. SHAME on them. SHAME on them.
That remains to be seen. Sometimes a half solution is even worse than doing nothing at all. Yes, it may have helped you in the short-term, but if we spend several more decades enslaved to insurance companies because the Democrats didn't have the courage to pass real reform, I'm not sure that's a win. Because without Obamacare, I agree stuff would get worse faster, which might lead to more of an uproar, which might have led to real reform sooner.
But it's all hypothetical. We have to live with the crap given to us by both parties, both of which are in the pockets of big business, neither of which has the fortitude to institute actual change like single payer... which would, of course, destroy large parts of the insurance industry.