But the President Himself Promised Me I Could Keep My Insurance!
Consulting By RPM is my corporation, which provides health insurance for my family. I recently received this letter from the insurance provider:
Dear Consulting By RPM Inc.:
Effective January 1, 2011, Bluegrass Family Health, Inc. will cease to provide coverage in the fully insured small group and large group markets in the state of Tennessee. Please accept this letter as our official notice of such discontinuation of coverage as required in accordance with the provisions of Tennessee Code Annotated Title 56, Chapter 7.
Bluegrass…received our Certificate of Authority in the state of Tennessee to transact business as a foreign Health Maintenance Organization in December 2006. We were welcomed by the Tennessee Department of Commerce and Insurance in anticipation that our presence as an additional insurer to the market would provide more choices for Tennessee consumers. Sadly, in 2009 our ability to compete in the fully insured small and large group health insurance markets was crippled by the passage of Senate Bill 2357, which requires all Health Maintenance Organizations doing business in the state of Tennessee to pay a 5.5% tax on the gross amount of all dollars collected from or on behalf of an enrollee. Undue pressure placed upon our organization by the increase of premium tax from 2% to 5.5% made competition with non Health Maintenance Organizations in Tennessee impossible.
There must be some mistake. I was happy with my pre-existing insurance coverage…?
I bet Bluegrass is going to get hounded for trying to blame this on the new health care legislation, just as pretty much everyone else has.
(Btw, here’s the Sumner crticism we’d talked about writing a few days ago. I’d appreciate if you could tell me how far off the deep end I am. Skip to the bullet points at the bottom if you’re pressed for time.)
Your mistake is that you were not in fact happy. You just didn’t know it.
It sounds like the drop in coverage is the result of a change in Tennessee law, not by anything Obama did.
Yeah, the fact that it’s talking about something passed in 2009 made me wonder. OK you ruined the joke.
Sorry about that. If it makes you feel better, Obama still has at least a couple of years to screw up your life. 🙂