Businesses rally to protest rising cost of health care

Portland Business Journal:

In 2007, North Portland property manager Diane Frank paid $276 a month for her individual insurance plan.

That same package today costs her more than $600 a month. If she needs primary care or specialty treatments, she must pay a $2,500 deductible.

For major medical expenses, the first $10,000 for her bill comes from her own pocket.

“It’s unsustainable: One-third of my income goes toward health care,” said Frank, who declined to name her Oregon insurer for fear that her coverage would be discontinued. “It goes up every year and they give me no explanation.”

Frank is one of a growing number of small business owners backing Senate Bill 717, a measure that would require a public hearing when a health insurer seeks to boost rates by more than 7 percent.

Primarily, the Reasonable Insurance Premium Coalition, which backs the measure, consists of real estate brokers, lawyers and sole proprietors like Frank. With fewer than four weeks left in Oregon’s 2011 legislative session, it’s the last remaining measure in an insurance regulation bill bundle introduced earlier this year by Sen. Chip Shields.

As it aims to capture at least one victory, the small business coalition will face battle-tested lobbyists who represent health care interests.

“We want to facilitate support from small businesses because so much anger is coalescing around insurance issues,” said Ann Fisher, a Portland attorney and one of the coalition’s leaders. “(Rate increases) are too important to be done in secret, which is the way it’s done now.”Shields’ supporters include the Oregon Landscape Contractors Association, which called the insurer hearings proposal “reasonable and fair.” Most landscape companies employ fewer than 10 workers and are frequently blind-sided when rate requests are granted with little regulatory analysis, said Bill Cross, the group’s executive director.

Harney County Judge Steven Grasty, who’s also the county administrator, also wants more rate increase hearings. Grasty’s public employees’ insurance costs have risen by double digits in all but one of the last 30 years. The hearings could simply deter insurers from seeking broad increases, he testified in March. Realtor groups JMA Properties, of Portland, and Windermere Real Estate also back Shields’ efforts. Both groups, in letters to the Ways and Means Committee, noted that their industry’s slump has made them watch every penny.

“We understand that this bill might have a cost,” seven JMA employees wrote.” But with $1.5 billion in premiums collected in 2009 on individual and small group policies, the impact is literally a penny or two per policy holder ... We deserve the ability to examine rate increase requests and to provide meaningful input into the rate making process.”

But lobbyists for Providence Health Plans told Shields in March that SB 717’s value is questionable.

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