The Rest Of The Story

Here’s another story starting to make the rounds to illustrate how horrible the insurance companies are. I’m sure Keith Olbermann will be screaming about it at the top of his lungs pretty soon, but I’ve quite watching him, so somebody else will have to report on that. It seems that insurance companies are declining to insure more people in 2009 than they did in 2007. Interesting comparison.

The difference between those years was an increase of “nearly 50 percent” as reported in the Reuters article yesterday.

In a report released on Tuesday, the House Energy and Commerce Committee's top Democrats said the number of people refused health insurance plans by big insurers […] due to pre-existing conditions rose 49 percent in the last three years.

Actual numbers are always helpful if you want to know the truth, and to Reuters’ credit, it does provide those numbers; denials rose from 172,400 in 2007 to 257,100 in 2009, an increase of 84,700 denials.

What else happened between 2007 and 2009 I wonder? Oh, yes, 3.5 million people lost their jobs. We don’t know how many lost their health insurance along with their jobs, and because of COBRA and people who could not afford to buy insurance, “health care reform” or not, it’s pretty hard to calculate how many of those applied for individual insurance policies, and how many of those who applied were declined for preexisting conditions. But is it unreasonable to think that 2% of them might fall into that category?

“And now,” as Paul Harvey used to say, “you know the rest of the story.”