Obama’s proposed national, public health care plan has received such fierce opposition, that it has now turned to private cooperatives, like Group Health, to maintain competitive rates against private insurers.
Group Health Cooperative, like other cooperatives, offer its members both insurance and health care services. This system is better known as a health maintenance organization (HMO), where all necessary medical care is provided in exchange for a fixed payment.
Creating an effective HMO doesn’t happen overnight. Group Health has existed for over 60 years, and has culminated over 600,000 members. Group Health is the 3rd largest insurer in Seattle, following Regence BlueShield and Premera.
Members are generally pleased with Group Health – complaints against the cooperative are less than one-third of those brought against the top 2 insurers.
However, health care costs cannot even be avoided by the cooperatives. Group Health significantly raised its premiums over the past couple years to absorb the increased cost of health care.
Despite the good intentions of a member-based health care system – public or private – there are downfalls and benefits to each. A public system requires an extreme overhaul of the private insurance industry – while the HMO approach will lead to a greater concentration and overhead of HMOs, that may not ultimately realize the goals of the people and the Obama Administration: lower health care costs.
