Rate Hike Protesters Say “Insurance Greed Kills”

“Insurance Greed Kills” read the banner carried by protesters outside the Connecticut Insurance Department public hearing on health insurance company requests for rate increases up to 23%.

In 2021 Cigna CEO David Cordani made $91 million. “Do Connecticut consumers need to make him even richer?” asked the flier distributed by Connecticut Citizens Action Group (CCAG)..

Additionally, Cigna spent $7.2 billion buying back its own stock and reported $148 billion gross profits.

“Yes, 2022 was quite a year for Bloomfield based Cigna,” said CCAG.. “The problem is, all that money could have paid for health care – but instead made the rich even richer!”

They are calling for a review of practices that extract billions of dollars from health care citing nearly $400 billion spent in 2022 on executive compensation, profits, and stock buybacks by four publicly-traded health insurance companies: Elevance/Anthem, Cigna, CVS Health and UnitedHealth. 

 

These are the same insurance companies who threatened Governor Lamont should the state pass a public option which would have extended the state’s health plan to thousands of people. It would have been administered by private health insurance companies

“Their greed is appalling,” said Tom Swan, Executive Director of CCAG . “We spend more than any other country on healthcare and we have the worst results — because we treat healthcare as a commodity.  There are too many people extracting too much money.”

“We are sick and tired of corporate interests getting policy makers to punch down and perpetuate the lie that patient protections and utilization are the reasons that healthcare is so expensive,” Swan added. “We need to consider options like banning use of premium dollars for stock buybacks and transparency around vertical integration.”

Testimonies and a letter writing campaign demanded that the Connecticut Insurance Department (CID) take into account what is really driving health care costs and reject all proposed rate hikes. Instead. The CID was called upon to investigate what's really driving health care costs: executive compensation for the top executives, profits, lobbying, arrangements with vertically integrated entities, mergers and acquit ions.

According to the office of Health Care Strategy, In 2021 commercial healthcare spending grew 18.8% in Connecticut while median household income increased by only 1.9%, deepening the healthcare coverage crisis for families in the state.