Dear Editor,
The recent VTDigger article about the financial struggles of Blue Cross Blue Shield of Vermont was déjà vu. It reminded me of another time in the past when we were at this point where Blue Cross Blue Shield was petitioning the Green Mountain Care Board for huge rate increases to prevent their potential insolvency.
It was in 2019, the last year before Covid-19 changed our lives, when the GMCB granted a 12.4% and a 10.1% rate increase for BCBSVT and MVP, respectively. After that decision, the board’s chair, Kevin Mullin, said, “We acknowledge they are not affordable. But at the same time we can’t put a company out of business.” This year, Senator Ginny Lyons (D-Chittenden Southeast), chair of the Senate Health and Welfare Committee, said, “We can’t let Blue Cross and Blue Shield go under.”
Well, why not? Do we really need these costly insurance companies to do what we could easily do ourselves if we possessed the moral courage and the political will to do it? As the former vice president of corporate communications at Cigna, Wendell Potter — now an advocate for universal health care — said of his former industry: “Health insurers have been successful at two things: Making money and getting the American public to believe they’re essential.”
They are absolutely not essential and we know it.
This is the broader question that we must ask ourselves yet again as we contemplate even heftier rate increase requests from BCBSVT to keep it afloat: How much longer will it be before we have nothing left to give to it? How many more of these déjà vus will BCBSVT have in the upcoming years while our wages stay flat?
Once again, it’s time to think about it.
Walter Carpenter
Montpelier
