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The Health Insurance Advocate Newsletter

Eighth Edition 2010
Mandating Higher Premiums and Higher Taxes
Politicians love to sign health insurance mandates into law like the new “Autism Mandate” a.k.a. SB618 that was recently signed in Missouri. This mandate was authored by Republican Scott Rupp and signed into law by Missouri Governor Jay Nixon. It is because of bills such as this one that politicians get to be heroes by forcing the “evil” insurance companies to cover conditions like Autism and while giving voters new health insurance benefits. But the question remains, who pays for this h
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The Medicare Advantage?
Well, there is some good news for Medicare recipients: President Obama is sending all of you a check for $250 dollars! In fact, the check is in the mail! Here is the bad news: do you remember during the debate about National Health Care when Humana sent that letter out to its Medicare Advantage customers advising that ObamaCare would cut benefits, and criticized ObamaCare for its impact on Medicare Advantage plans? Remember how in response to that letter, Senator Max Baucus and Medicare went aft
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Not All Insurance is Created Equal
I thought I would share an experience about a charity called C-3 Missions - The Global Orphan Project. You may have recently seen their story on 60 Minutes. They needed health insurance so my company, Benefits by Design, Inc. “appt’d” them up and went out to bid. The bids came in and the costs on two carriers came in lower than the others. One carrier had a significant advantage over the other; that carrier was AETNA. You see, C-3 Missions has nine orphanages in Haiti and was frantically w
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The Whole Truth about Anthem Wellpoint The Whole Truth about Anthem Wellpoint
Many of you may have heard or read the story reported by Reuters, that Anthem Wellpoint was singling out women with breast cancer to cancel their insurance policies; unfortunately, as is often the case with the “drive-by media” Reuters got it wrong. One of the women named in the story as having her insurance cancelled or rescinded is Robin Beaton. If Reuters would have checked its facts, they would have discovered that Ms. Beaton wasn’t even an Anthem Wellpoint policyholder, and in fact sh
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Massachusetts is not the Answer
With ObamaCare less than a month old, Senator Diane Feinstein, a California Democrat, is proposing a new Bill in the Senate Healthcare Committee to impose Federal price controls on insurance companies. Democrats, such as Feinstein, propose to do this by allowing states to reject premium increases they deem unreasonable. While 27 states conduct rate reviews on small group and individual policies, they don’t use it as a political tool like Governor Duval Patrick of Massachusetts where three majo
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To Ration or not to Ration? To Ration or not to Ration?
The Obama administration Medicare actuary Richard Foster recently released a report that estimates healthcare costs will grow past the $4.7 trillion for ObamaCare by 2019. That caused Mr. Foster to state that he expects 15% of our hospitals to be driven into a budget deficit as a result, thus jeopardizing access to care for Medicare beneficiaries. Couple this with the recent statement by Dr. Donald Berwick, the White House’s nominee for Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Se
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