Big health-care insurance firms are struggling to find a profit in this low-interest-rate environment, that is a reason to be concerned for opponents of the doctor-assisted suicide movement that's gaining momentum in america, including Nj.
It is a tough market generally for insurance underwriters, which are facing escalating health-care costs.
Critics say some insurers would be satisfied to determine many insured patients swiftly end their lives – that would help them save money on rising industry costs that may no longer be offset by investment income.
Patrick Brannigan, executive director of the New Jersey Catholic Conference, told The Post that lots of oppose physician-assisted suicide because it is a direct threat to anyone considered a significant cost liability to a health-care provider.
A troubled health-care system and legally assisted suicide, when combined, really are a “deadly mix,” according to Marilyn Golden, senior policy analyst of the Disability Rights Education & Defense Fund. Golden, a disability rights activist, warns that when assisted suicide is legal, “it immediately becomes the least expensive treatment.”
“Direct coercion isn't even necessary,” Golden, said, “because insurers deny, or perhaps merely delay, approval of someone's expensive life-sustaining treatment – they will be steered toward hastening their death.” There is already some evidence out of Oregon, the first state to legalize assisted suicide, to aid this view, she added.
Health insurers seemingly refused to pay for the treatments recommended by doctors for 2 cancer patients there.
Instead, the insurers offered to pay for alternative “treatments,” including assisted suicide, based on Golden.
This broken, profit-driven health-care system, as some call it, is anathema to a lot of opponents of assisted suicide, which is now permitted in five states, having a renewed push within the Tri-State area recently.
The so-called “Aid in Dying” bill that would allow crictally ill patients to be medication to finish their lives just passed the brand new Jersey Assembly on Thursday, but it hasn't been posted for a vote within the state Senate yet.
Analyst the low investment returns eked out by insurers might be behind this thinking on insurers' role in assisted suicide. US health insurers have made money over time by pricing their products appropriately, based on certain risk parameters, and through investment income of the reserves they have to hold – as required legally – in anticipation of paying claims, based on Mike Fitzgerald, a senior analyst following a industry at Celent.
“Because of the a low interest rate yields on government bonds, which regulators mandate they hold in significant amounts to be able to reduce the investment risk, insurers can no longer count on this as a source of income,” based on Fitzgerald. “Thus, the pressure is onto improve their core operations and to grow.”
The insurers are under severe cost pressure, which can be offset either through hiking prices and premiums, or by reduction of operational spending, Fitzgerald said.
US health-care spending already makes up about some 18 percent of GDP, or nearly $2.8 trillion in 2021.
But US insurance companies reject the claims.
“We haven't taken a situation on the 'assisted-suicide' provisions, nor has AHIP taken a job at the federal or state level on these bills,” Clare Krusing, a spokeswoman for America's Medical health insurance Plans (AHIP), the health insurance industry trade group based in Washington, told The Post.
