I don’t mean to get political on a blog to promote my website and my legal services. Politics can be very divisive and the last thing I want to do is offend anyone.
However, after representing scores and scores of clients over the years who have no health insurance and seeing the adverse results of this – the inability to get the back surgery he so needs to continue working, the client whose “primary care” is only ever going to the emergency room when she’s really sick rather than seeing a physician before reaching that critical state, and, in one tragic case, the client who died from cancer waiting for any kind of chemotherapy because she couldn’t find an oncologist that would take her Medicaid – over time the so-called Affordable Care Act (ACA) has been clicking into action to right some of these problems.
This week, the refunds are going out in the mail. If you are a self-paying insured, or if you are an employer in a small business paying premiums for employees, watch your mailbox.
You may not realize it, but last year another portion of the ACA went into effect mandating that health insurance companies spend at least 80% of its premiums on actual health insurance. Until then, health insurance companies were free to spend your premiums on anything they’d like. In fact, funds spent on actual healthcare was more like in the 60th percentile. The rest went to over-the-top marketing, absurd salaries and crazy bonuses.
This has not only been widely reported, but our firm also received a refund from our health insurance company for the year 2011 this week. The check was in the thousands of dollars. You can imagine what this refund check has done for our former health insurance company (we fired them in December, 2011) having to send out probably tens of millions of dollars in refunds to thousands of individuals and companies, alike. The days of obscene profits at the cost of the health insurance of their insureds is over.
The point of this policy is not only to benefit Americans, but to ensure that from this point forward health insurance companies don’t waste money internally and to be more efficient in administering and paying for health care costs.
Next time “Uncle Joe” complains about Obama’s “socialized medicine” perhaps he should consider how socialistic it is to give consumers what they actually paid for.