How do health premiums get set?
TEXT OF STORY
Kai Ryssdal: Executives from some of the country’s biggest insurance companies met with Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius today. And she had a couple questions for them. Like, what’s the deal with those huge premium increases they’ve announced lately? And, how’d you come up with the numbers, anyway?
The official answers are going to take a while, so we asked Gregory Warner at the Marketplace Health Desk at WHYY in Philadelphia to fill in the blanks.
GREGORY WARNER: It starts with the rating manual. Every insurance company has one. But few people are allowed to see it.
JOHN VATAHA: Highly proprietary information.
John Vataha is an actuarial consultant. He’s been hired by insurance companies to review their rating manuals. It’s strictly confidential.
VATAHA: They make me sign a statement that says, we’re basically letting you look under the hood, but you aren’t allowed to go and tell anybody else what you saw.
Let’s say a small company wants to buy insurance. The insurance company will use the rating manual to assess the risk of each employee, based on various factors. So, let’s say somebody in that company is like me: 35 years old, white male living in Philadelphia. Vataha chooses a round number to start with, say, a premium $100 a month.
VATAHA: So you start with that. And then you adjust and say OK, if a $100 is the average, and I’m in downtown Philadelphia, that might be a 10 percent increase factor.
Because Philadelphia is a city with lots of teaching hospitals where there are more specialists, and care tends to be more expensive.
VATAHA: So now I’m up to a $110.
But, I’m a white collar worker…
VATAHA: Which might be a 5 percent less than average.
Because my on-the-job accidents are limited to getting my ego bruised.
VATAHA: So now I’m down to a $105. Until you’ve exhausted all the different rating factors, and you would come out with your final rate.
You didn’t think it was that easy, right? The most important rating factor of all isn’t listed in any of those tables.
VATAHA: You can’t look up a rating manual and see a factor that says, “adjustment for anti-selection.”
“Anti-selection” is the enemy of insurance company profits.
Anti-selection is when healthy people tend to sit out and insurance companies are left covering more sick people than they planned on. It’s not a big deal in large companies, where pretty much every employee — sick or well, young and old — is on the policy.
But small businesses have a big turnover rate with insurers and with their employees. That’s a riskier bet for insurance companies. Each year an insurer is looking at 30 percent of their policyholders being replaced. Every new employee is someone who can decide whether he wants to buy into the plan, based on whether he thinks he’ll need it that year.
ED KAPLAN: In essence, the buyer is more nimble than the insurance company.
Ed Kaplan of the benefits consulting firm the Segal Company says basically: You can quit them, but they can’t drop you.
And so insurance companies raise the price of your premiums to insure themselves against loss in case you leave them. That’s the price that more and more people can’t afford.
In Philadelphia, I’m Gregory Warner for Marketplace.
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