Reduced insurance options not helpful

UnitedHealthcare has 2.6 million customers in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. Health Net of the Northeast has about 578,000 in the same region, including nearly 200,000 in Connecticut.

This trend to reduce competition makes it more difficult for medical groups and hospitals to negotiate reasonable rates. Meanwhile, insurers cherry-pick younger, healthier consumers and dump others, or prohibitively raise premiums, when renewals come up. That's why health care reform proposals in Congress include a "public option" to provide competition and requirements that insurers extend coverage to all.

We'd like to see as much concern in Congress about decreasing competition in the health insurance industry as there is concerning the imagined threat that adding a public option to the mix will magically morph into a single-payer system.

Meanwhile, here in Connecticut, it is outrageous that the state Insurance Department - which must rule on the request by UnitedHealthcare to go forward with the $510 million deal - denied on a technicality the request of the Connecticut State Medical Society, Physicians Advocacy Institute, American Medical Association and Connecticut Healthy Policy Project to become intervenors in the case. The groups submitted their intervenor requests six days before Monday's hearing, but not the required six business days, the Hartford Courant reported.

Such myopic decisions are why consumers and doctors sometimes feel the deck is stacked in favor of insurers.