Insurance carrier HMSA is seeking another price hike, this time at 3.6 percent. Literally one day after Kaiser Permanente announced they would be trying to raise prices, HMSA announces that they want to increase their prices as well. This most recent HMSA price hike comes after two years of double digit price hikes.
HMSA is the state’s largest health insurer, and plans to raise premiums by an average 3.6 percent next year for 84,000 members who work at large companies could gouge most of us even more than we already are.
HMSA has already increased premiums by a whopping 14.8 percent this year for large businesses and 11.7 percent last year, but said it believes the rates have now caught up with costs, which have moderated after escalating in 2009 and 2010. If you total this up and include the new 3.6 percent price hike, HMSA has increased their premium prices by over 30 percent in a two-year span. Does anyone else think that is crazy?
As stated above, HMSA’s announcement of a proposed rate increase comes a day after Kaiser Permanente Hawaii, the state’s second-largest health insurer, said it is seeking an average 8.8 percent premium hike for about 162,000 members on Jan. 1.
“It’s so discouraging sometimes because it seems like both medical carriers increase rates whenever they want to,” said Tim Lyons, president of Hawaii Business League, an advocacy organization of 1,000 businesses. “This is something everybody’s got to have. People are totally panicked without insurance. They (insurers) certainly don’t seem to temper those increases very much.”
Here is my main question. How are we as individuals going to continue to be able to afford health insurance? The premiums are so high, that if you are trying to get coverage for a family, you are probably let with very little in your paycheck.
I will use the same example I did yesterday when speaking on Kaiser.. A friend of mine works a full time job (for the DOE). He is already dealing with pay cuts. He has to provide insurance for his entire family. After premiums are taken out, and with the current DOE pay cuts, he is left with a little over $200 per paycheck. That is not enough to support a family. Even if you factor out the pay cut, he would still be left with only around $350 per paycheck.
Insurance premiums are getting so high that they are becoming almost unattainable. He problem is we have no choice. How many more price hikes from HMSA and Kaiser can we plan to see in the next year.
In case you are interested, HMSA posted a $5.8 million profit in the second quarter, reversing a $4.1 million year-earlier loss.
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