This commentary is by Walter Carpenter of Montpelier, who works in Vermont’s tourism business and is a writer and a health care activist. In 2006, he nearly died at the hands of the health care system. He is on the advisory committee of the Green Mountain Care Board.
I am writing to oppose the proposed merger of Blue Cross Blue Shield of Vermont with the Michigan Blues.
I know that our state regulators, especially the Department of Financial Regulation, are tripping over themselves to push this through as fast as possible. It seems that whatever Vermont BCBS wants, it gets, no matter what the cost to us who will get stuck paying the bill for it.
I write in the dimming hope that this warning will cause these regulators, and our legislators, to examine the proposed merger with the urgency, and in the depth, that it deserves before they jump us into this disaster so quickly.
I am 68 years old, on traditional Medicare, and am now one of the millions of Americans and thousands of Vermonters who just got summarily kicked off Medicaid after the pandemic. Medicaid was my Medigap coverage. This injustice alone says a fantastic amount about what this nation values more. It is certainly not the health care and the lives of its citizens.
This eviction forced me to “buy” a Medigap policy, thus enriching what will most likely be a mega-corporation with my dollars. Some of these dollars will no doubt go to pay the exorbitant CEO salaries and the lobbyists and our political system to keep things this way because it is good for them.
The harm that these values inflict on so many people will only be exacerbated by this merger — a more benign word for what’s really going on, which is a takeover. This move will not save us any money. It will just make our access to health care even more difficult than it already is under our worship of private health insurance.
To really understand what an out-of-state insurer a thousand miles away from Vermont and its laws — an insurer that already has a dubious record — will do to “save money,” one should experience it firsthand. I learned what a hell this is when I went through it. It was 17 years ago now, but I still have PTSD over it. I almost died from it.
The insurer was employer-sponsored (paid for by the customers of that employer and by the general public, but that is another story) through my employer at the time. The sheer amount of claim denials and prior authorizations they forced me to battle through for every procedure or test was far worse than fighting the life-threatening disease itself.
Since they were out of state, and denying claims by either medical directors or algorithms is where the big money is, it was much harder to fight them for everything than an in-state insurer. The company knew this very well. I’m sure both parties in this takeover also know this just as well. To blithely state that it will benefit Vermonters by lowering costs, better technology, and so on is to live in a fantasy.
Monopolies like this will only use their bigger clout in the so-called market to raise prices, pay their CEOs even more millions than they already skim off our health care dollars, use their power to deny claims and enforce more prior authorizations, and so on. Access to health care for Vermonters insured through Vermont BCBS will be controlled by Michigan medical directors or these computer algorithms charged with saving the company money. I also suspect that they will heavily push their own private Medicare plans onto us. This private Medicare is not Medicare and is not an advantage.
While I am grateful that the Department of Financial Regulation held public hearings on the issue, I suspect it is just going through the motions. If this absorption does save policyholders like me a few dollars here and there, these savings will be more than offset by the levels of stress that we will be put through.
No one has ever bothered to measure the incredible stress levels that our grotesque health care non-system causes in people.
If we as a state value access to health care, bad enough as it already is, over profit or “operating revenue” as it is called in the nonprofit world, this merger should be vetoed outright and prevented at all costs. If we do not, as seems likely, Vermonters like myself will be the ones who will have to suffer for it.
We should not condemn Vermonters to having their health care governed by an out-of-state corporation. I know this from experience.
