Insurance, Trust + the Free Market System

According to the IBM Institute for Business Value, “The insurance industry suffers from a general lack of trust — the ‘animosity issue.’” In fact, only 41% of U.S. customers agree with the statement that “insurance companies can be completely trusted.”

So, I was very interested when I saw a piece on Boing Boing on the “anti-universal-health-care” movement which ultimately led me to Bill Moyers’ interview of Wendell Potter on PBS. A former VP of public relations at Cigna, Potter was talking about the “dirty tricks” used by the insurance industry to fight universal healthcare.

“The [insurance] industry has always tried to make Americans think that government-run systems are the worst thing that could possibly happen to them, that if you even consider that, you're heading down on the slippery slope towards socialism,” Potter said. “We shouldn't fear government involvement in our health care system. There is an appropriate role for government.”

I say, let the free market compete — and if government comes in, they will compete, too.

Medicaid Insurance Crisis: Who’s in Charge of PR Here?

According to an article in the AARP Bulletin, a new rule designed to keep illegal immigrants off the Medicaid insurance rolls has had the net effect of denying healthcare coverage to tens of thousands of Native Americans … because they can’t prove that they’re U.S. citizens!

No one knows precisely how many have been affected, but in Oklahoma alone, more than 20,000 of its 700,000 Medicaid recipients — of whom almost 13% are Native Americans — have been dropped from the program, “not because they aren’t citizens, but because they’re having a tough time coming up with the right pieces of paper at the right time,” according to Mike Fogarty, CEO of the Oklahoma Health Care Authority.

Native Americans and other minorities, including African Americans and Latinos, experience higher rates of infant mortality, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, HIV/AIDS and cancer, according to the Office of Minority Health of the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services. The causes are complex, but two major factors are 1) inadequate access to care and
2) substandard quality of care.

In today’s troubled economy, the issue of healthcare insurance for all Americans has the potential to become a serious public relations crisis for the entire insurance industry.