PROVIDENCE – Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Rhode Island (BCBSRI) on Friday filed a request with the Office of the Health Insurance Commissioner (OHIC) that would increase rates an average of 11.5 percent for small groups and 14.6 percent for large groups.
“As a nonprofit, our primary goal is to establish rates that cover the costs of the medical services actually provided to our members,” James E. Purcell, BCBSRI’s president and chief executive officer, said in a news release. “For 2009, those costs are projected to reach $1.5 billion. … As a result, despite these difficult economic times, it is necessary for us to seek a rate increase.”
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According to Purcell, the steep increase in the cost of medical services has forced the company to dip into its reserves. Reserves help ensure the company’s ability to pay hospitals, doctors and other providers for the services they provide members.
BCBSRI says it only has enough money in reserve to pay claims for slightly more than two months, less than the three months recommended in a study commissioned by the OHIC.
If the BCBSRI request is approved, effective dates for the proposed new rates would be May 1, 2010, for small groups and July 1, 2010, for large groups. Differing factors, such as employee demographics, could result in individual groups seeing premium changes that differ from these averages.
BCBSRI, What is your current advertising campaign costing?
I wonder what ever happened to doing more with less, which is what small business owners have been forced to do for years. At some point in time, with these types of rate increases, health care willl be unaffordable to ALL. Then, there will be no subscribers to any of the insurers, and their current reserves will only fund the closing of the insurer’s business. A complete structural review of how the insurers conduct business is in order because it seems that they are unable to control costs, and they are pricing out a larger portion of their customers each year.