Seeking to salvage two years of efforts to completely remake California’s health insurance system, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Democratic legislators are nearing deals intended to rein in costly, meager medical insurance policies sold directly to individuals.

In the final weeks of the legislative session, they are negotiating measures that would limit insurer profits on California individual insurance plans, require plans to provide a minimum set of benefits and restrict insurers’ ability to cancel policies retroactively.

The new focus reflects how far Schwarzenegger remains from his original healthcare goal: to orchestrate medical insurance for the 5 million Californians who lack it. Despite a year of strenuous campaigning for his vision, which garnered attention nationwide, the state Senate rejected that $14.9-billion plan in January.

Many of the concepts now under discussion were included in that proposal. Although most California insurers supported the governor’s broader effort because it would have created millions of new customers, the industry is uniformly resisting the current push to circumscribe some of its most lucrative products.

Three million Californians buy health insurance on their own rather than through employers. Insurers keep health insurance premiums low — and profits high, their critics say — on some individual policies by limiting the services they cover. Such plans may exclude prescription drugs and maternity services, for example; others may cover only hospital visits.

Many of the policies have big deductibles and require patients to pay large portions of their expenses, costing them much more than coverage obtained at workplaces.

Click here for your free California health insurance quote today!

Click here for your free California dental insurance quote!

Share on Facebook

Related posts:

1. California Takes Another Crack at Insurance Reform After a failed attempt to pass a universal health plan early this year, California is now looking to rein in the notoriously consumer-unfriendly market for California individual health insurance....
2. California Taking Another Crack at Insurance Care Reform California Taking Another Crack at Insurance Care Reform...
3. California Offers Lessons on Insurance Exchanges As Congress debates creating insurance “exchanges” as part of a health-care overhaul, the failure of a similar effort in California may offer important insights, former participants in the program say. From 1993 to 2006, small businesses in California could buy health insurance through an exchange run initially by the government, and later by a nonprofit [...]...
4. Insurance Cancellation Questions Could Spread Beyond California Today’s Health Blog jargon of the day is rescission, the California insurance industry’s practice of revoking individual insurance policies because of health-related mistakes or omissions on the application for coverage. The companies say this is a key step for fighting fraud, but they’ve come under criticism in California by those who accuse them of going [...]...
5. Sudden health-care changes unlikely in California Given all Barack Obama said about change during the presidential race, he might be expected to quickly revamp America’s health-care system, which virtually everyone calls a mess. Local people who have pushed for health-care reform say, however, they don’t expect major changes in a hurry. But they do foresee the new president attending to the [...]...