In another victory for the right of health care consumers to challenge sky-high health insurance rates, UnitedHealthcare, the largest New York health insurer, has agreed to make available to the public the entire rate filing that it provides to the state Department of Financial Services (“DFS”) to evaluate whether the insurer’s proposals to increase its rates are reasonable. This step will create more openness in rate proceedings and enable consumers to take a more active role in challenging outrageous health insurance increases. As a result of a law Citizen Action and its allies at Health Care for All New York (HCFANY) got passed in 2010, consumers can file comments to DFS in opposition to sky-high health insurance rate increases, but we can’t be that effective if we don’t have access to the data health insurers use to justify their rate proposals.
“New York’s families and small businesses are just trying to keep up with the high cost of health care,” says Jessica Wisneski, our Legislative Campaigns Director and Steering Committee Chair for Health Care For All New York. “Consumers have a right to know why their insurance company would raise rates even higher. We are glad that United Healthcare has decided to act responsibly by releasing necessary information for consumers to weigh in. We strongly encourage other insurers to follow their lead.”
HCFANY recently called for the public release of health insurer rate materials in order to facilitate public input in the rate review process. Many health insurers are opposing disclosure of these materials to the public, because they don’t want their competitors to have access to the data and because they’re obviously not thrilled with average consumers looking over their shoulders! As Citizen Action Policy Director Bob Cohen wrote last week, refusing to reveal documents that health insurers use to determine how high they set their rates is directly removing consumers from the very process that costs much of their hard earned money.
UnitedHealthcare’s agreement to voluntary reveal this data to consumers is a huge victory in the battle for fair health insurance rates. The fact that UnitedHealthcare has revealed their rate data shows that our campaign was successful in pushing for more transparency. Hopefully, more insurance companies will follow in making this information public. As the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators highlight every day, highly profitable big corporations like UnitedHealthcare have to be held accountable to us, especially when it comes to critically needed services like health insurance.
As Bob also wrote last week, Empire attorney Sean Doolan’s arguments, that releasing the documents “could cause not only confusion … to the layman policyholder” and that documents contain “esoteric … pricing concepts best understood by fellow actuaries” were red herrings. Consumer groups can and have already hired their own actuaries to represent them in health insurer rate proceedings, just like “lay” consumers participate in many other complex legal proceedings by hiring lawyers, actuaries, accountants and other professionals. We are pleased that democracy has won over greed and the shameless search for unreasonable profits this time.