Fighting For The Public Option: Putting Health Access Over Profiteering

By Bill Shortell

(Editor’s Note: Public Option legislation (SB 842) to give CT residents affordable plans not covered by traditional health insurance is drawing heavy opposition from insurance lobbyists and industry leaders in the General Assembly with key votes about to occur in the state House and Senate. Former New Britain Democratic Chair and Machinist union leader Bill Shortell takes on CBIA lobbyists and insurance executives in this commentary.

Since I wrote “Debunking CBIA’s Takedown of the Public Option” there have been two more attacks by the business community on the Public Option.

One, the small arms fire of the CBIA, the other the artillery of the corporate insurance giants. Let’s deal with the small fry first.   The Connecticut Business and Industry Association (CBIA), having no other arguments, simply repeats their pathetically misleading call for an outside audit. If they read the easily available “Report on the Connecticut Partnership Plan,” they will find that the state has hired, in a competitive bid, one of the largest private actuarial firms in the world, Segal consultancy, to examine the books.   They don’t just wait a period of time and then take a look to see if there have been any mistakes, they are embedded in the process of calculating risk and premiums. Do the talking heads in the CBIA want to argue with Segal, a firm with the credibility to vouch for the Plan’s integrity?   Any honest person, by the way, who knows anything about the State Office of the Comptroller, is aware that we have been blessed with unimpeachable expertise , transparency, and integrity here in Connecticut for decades. The mud that petulant detractors throw at them splashes back in their own faces.

CBIA loves to toss around the phrase, “medical loss ratio.” MLR is a disgusting corporate term for how much of your premiums go into actual care. That’s a “loss,” the business of the health insurance industry being to maximize profit, not to save lives.   Somehow these twisted industry representatives want us to believe that the lower the MLR, that is, the amount spent on actual care, the better place the world is. In fact, insurance companies were driving the ratio so low, that the Feds stepped in and required that no less than 80% of premiums go for care. That leaves 20% for overhead. If you go below 80, you are cheating the customer. There is, of course, no regulatory cap on MLR, as CBIA has asserted.   The administrative overhead for the Connecticut Partnership Plan is 2.5 %. That means more dollars for care, and nothing for CEO pockets.  

And that’s why top insurance executives hate the Public Option. They hate it so bad that the five CEO Bigs recently held hands and told us that they would all jump off the Charter Oak Bridge if we dared take a tiny portion of healthcare out of the world of profit and humongous executive salaries.   Among these five executives by the way, they pull down about $150,000,000 a year in compensation.   They claim that everybody works from home now, and they could boss their 50,000 workers from any place. In fact, however, as COVID-19 wanes, workers are making their way back to the office. There is a limit to the productivity of decentralized labor. These despots are menacing the home lives of their own workforce and our state legislative process at the same time, in order to dictate public policy.   The public is getting sick and tired of the constant refrain, “We’re Gonna Leave!” every time there’s a proposal to make life better for working people. It has less impact every time they use it and contributes to the already low opinion people have of insurance companies,federal government.

In 2019 it was just the battleship CIGNA firing on the Public Option. Now there’s a whole flotilla, and yet the forces for affordable healthcare fight on. That’s because we are entering a new era. The road to Universal Healthcare is not straight like Route 91. Popular confidence in the idea, although always robust, ebbs and flows.   The Great Recession of more than a decade ago rocked voters hopes for new government initiatives. That helped give energy to the miserable, selfish and corrupt administration that befouled our national government for four years after 2016.

As you can see from this chart of annual Gallup polls, opinions are now moving back in the positive direction. And we have a scrappy state legislature to match the public mood. The legislation is on the table to strike a blow for Health Care for All in Connecticut. Let’s get behind lawmakers pushing for it to get to the Governor’s desk!