The right-wing’s screwy health insurance delusion

Pat Garofalo at The Wonk Room recently pointed out Harvard economist and former Reagan Council of Economic Advisers Chairman Martin Feldstein’s whimsical take on health insurance, offered up in a CNBC segment. In what amounts to a rhetorical shrug, Feldstein seemed to say, “What’s all the fuss?”:

“[Insurance companies] turn down very, very few things, and again it is not the government doing it. So if my insurance company doesn’t allow certain drugs or doesn’t allow certain kinds of treatments, I can choose a different kind of policy.”

Feldstein must not listen to NPR. If he did, he would know that insurance companies kick so many people off their rolls that it prompted a year-long House investigation. He’d have heard about this on a terrifying report a few weeks ago on This American Life. (On that page, you’re looking for Segment 3, aptly named “Restrictions May Apply,” at 35:18) The popular radio program borrowed some audio from a little-discussed hearing about a process known as rescission, a process that affects people who have individual insurance. Simply put, that’s when the health insurance company decides not to give you the care you think it covers — and you explicitly thought you were paying for — when you need it most, because it says you lied. Insurance agents comb agreements, which Bart Stupak (D-MI) thinks are deliberately made too difficult for ordinary Americans to fill out accurately, to find any reason to boot expensive cases.

One woman on the program was abandoned by Blue Cross & Blue Shield the Friday before her double mastectomy, the only treatment for her aggressive kind of cancer surgery, because she had acne. That acne, that argued, might actually have been a sign of cancer. Another man in Virginia lost his coverage because the insurance company’s own sales agent wrote his weight down wrong, and he never noticed or corrected it.

One final note: Is Feldstein really the only American who’s never heard the phrase “pre-existing condition?” If tends to come up when you try to switch health insurance carriers — especially if you’re looking for coverage of expensive drugs or treatments.