Ask Liz Weston

The corpse of health care reform wasn’t even cold before we got a letter from our insurer telling us our premiums were about to increase 40%, to $1,026 a month.

This is for a policy that has a $5,000-per-person deductible ($10,000 family). Eight years ago, when we first secured coverage, the premium was less than $250 a month.

We’re not alone. Our insurer, Anthem, is jacking rates on thousands of its policyholders, as this Los Angeles Times article attests. California’s insurance commissioner says he’s “very concerned.” I’ll bet.

Anthem is blaming this on rising health care costs. Insurance agents are saying Anthem’s trying to rid itself of less profitable policies.

Anthem does offer policies with even less coverage that might save us some money on monthly premiums, but we’d have to go through underwriting again—and our insurance agent doubts we’d pass.

Why is that, you might ask? Do we have cancer, diabetes, heart disease?

No. Neither of us is overweight. We don’t drink or smoke, we exercise regularly and we’re in excellent health.

But I’m over 40, and my husband is over 50, and we each take a prescription medication. Mine’s for an underactive thyroid. My husband’s cholesterol is a little high.

That’s it. But that’s enough to prevent us from getting new insurance.

There is nothing about this situation that isn’t insane.

I don’t believe insurance should cover every sniffle and check-up. I was fine with paying most of our family’s health care costs out of pocket, as long as we had protection against catastrophic expenses. But I also expect insurance companies to hold up their end. When they cherry-pick their customers, drop those who are sick and jam through eye-popping rate increases, they aren’t providing insurance in any real sense of the word. They’re not pooling risk; they’re evading it.

The good news is that we can afford this increase, and probably a few more to come. Others can’t. One of my friends got a notice that her premium is going up to $500, and she can’t pay it. She, like many of Anthem’s other customers, will be going bare.

Kathy Kristof writes in this thoughtful column that the reason health care reform is dead is that Congress doesn’t understand what insurance should really do.

So instead of getting what we needed—coverage that’s available, affordable and there when you need it—we got squat.

UPDATE: The Los Angeles Times is reporting that the Obama Administration has called on Anthem to justify these huge price increases. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, who used to head the National Association of Insurance Commissions, wrote that Sebelius said that Anthem’s “strong financial position” made the increases “even more difficult to understand”:

These extraordinary increases are up to 15 times faster than inflation and threaten to make healthcare unaffordable for hundreds of thousands of Californians, many of whom are already struggling to make ends meet in a difficult economy.