... rate realities

In the televised debate on health care reform, President Obama stood by his intent to reach more of the uninsured and take on the task of fixing a woefully flawed system, and one of the points he noted was the higher and higher insurance premiums working people are facing. That's no news to customers of Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina, who are seeing bigger bills come in. A News & Observer story Thursday cited a Durham man whose premium for his 15-year-old son was going up 11 percent, and for his 17-year-old daughter, 54 percent.

The company has been authorized by the state insurance commissioner to have a 12 percent raise on average this year.

For that Durham man, the increases reflected some adjustments the company made, he said, when it lowered the age at which premiums were to increase for his daughter. A Huntersville woman who saw that premiums on her 9-month-old son would go up 55 percent on Jan. 1 was stunned. She was told by BCBS, she said, that premiums on infants were going up because they use more services than older children.

Insurance companies say they're raising rates because healthy people aren't buying insurance, leaving a larger percentage of sick people in the pool, and because services are becoming more expensive. But Adam Linker, of the N.C. Justice Center's Health Access Coalition, a consumer advocacy group, has a darker suspicion: "...these also are in anticipation of new regulations. They're trying to pad their bottom lines before new rules kick in."

Companies vehemently deny that sort of thing. And in fact, with their resistance to the Obama health care reforms they seem wedded to the status quo. So maybe they're trying to have it both ways.