The market for commercial individual health insurance has become a major issue because in 17 counties individual policies are no longer sold, Washington's largest individual insurer, Premera Blue Cross, no longer accepts new applicants, and only two significant carriers, Regence BlueShield and Group Health Cooperative, remain in the market. But the pool has filled with sick people, health care costs are increasing, insurers are losing money and raising their rates to cover costs, and those in need cannot afford coverage. The CEOs promise that if the bill passes unchanged, their carriers will commit to selling individual insurance. Premera would reenter the market because, in its view, there would be incentives for people to buy and retain health insurance, and there would be a way to spread the costs of covering people needing expensive medical care. Under the bill, people presumably would be motivated to buy insurance before falling sick or pregnant because insurers could require those with preexisting health conditions to wait up to nine months for coverage to begin.
Current law limits the wait to only three months.
Premera withdrew from the individual market because it, along with other carriers, has been losing many millions of dollars on that business line. Carriers would use a standard health questionnaire to determine pool eligibility. For many young people, Smith said, that would raise the cost of insurance to an unacceptably high percentage of their income, pushing them out of the market and causing the uninsured population to increase. Insurers that market group but not individual coverage aren't too happy about the bill either. Lobbyist Basil Badley, representing the Health Insurance Association of America , said the bill would discourage commercial carriers in other states from entering Washington.