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Obama warns insurance companies not to unnecessarily raise costs
Loading ...President Obama met with the chief executives of more than a dozen major insurance companies at the White House on Tuesday to caution them against using new requirements in the recently enacted health-care reform legislation as a pretext to substantially raise premiums.
“There are genuine cost drivers that are not caused by insurance companies. But what is also true is that we’ve got to make sure this new law is not being used as an excuse to simply drive up costs,” the president said in a brief speech afterward. “The CEOs here today need to know that they’re going to be required to justify unreasonable premium increases.”
Karen Ignagni, president of the trade association America’s Health Insurance Plans, said she and other industry representatives found the meeting to be a “very constructive” opportunity to make the case that the main cause of rising premiums is not industry greed but recessionary pressures and increasing medical and drug costs.
“For instance, in the small employer and individual market, the economy is causing younger, healthier people to drop coverage, which means that the costs of the [remaining] risk pool is higher because it’s older and sicker,” she said.
Continue Reading at Washingtonpost.com.
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