Rescission: the antithesis of “right.”

A year ago this week, Kaiser Permanente was called to task for its practice of rescission, the retroactive termination of health insurance coverage. In many cases, coincidentally, Kaiser Permanente and other insurers will initiate a rescission investigation when someone has just been diagnosed with a serious illness, perhaps a serious and expensive illness.

Now that it’s easy to see why strategic rescission could easily save for-profit health plans millions of dollars, you have to ask yourself: Why would Kaiser Permanente, a not-for-profit plan, have been the first health plan ever ordered to reinstate coverage to a former member for its abhorrent practice of rescission? Better yet, why should a not-for-profit plan ever have been practicing rescission, to begin with, anyway?

Finally, this week, the Department of Managed Health Care and the California Department of Insurance have announced that they will introduce new regulations to try and stop health plans, like Kaiser Permanente, from dumping patients:

The Department of Managed Health Care, which governs health plans known as HMOs, and the Department of Insurance, which supervises insurance companies, said they would propose rules that reinforced existing laws forbidding rescissions except when they could show a policyholder was at fault. It marked the first time the two agencies had acted in concert on any regulations.

Unfortunately, many are saying the new regulations, alone, may not be enough to keep Kaiser Permanente and other health plans in check:

The Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights had petitioned the agencies for rules against rescissions and said the first draft was disappointing. Spokesman Jerry Flanagan said that to protect consumers, regulators must step in and require that insurers prove policyholder misconduct before allowing a company to carry out a cancellation. “They’ve restated the law here fairly well, but that’s not the point,” Flanagan said. “They are supposed to establish a process for making sure that the cancellations are fair and patients are protected.”

You can read the Foundation’s full response to the proposed regulations here.

Rescission shouldn’t even be a topic of discussion when it comes to Kaiser Permanente. But, George Halvorson has worked to transform Kaiser Permanente into a profit-generating machine, a machine that is not accountable to its physicians or its members. “Kaiser Permanente [has] been hit with [record] six-figure fines for revoking policies,” isn’t a headline a not-for-profit organization should be generating, but sure enough you could have read just that earlier this year in USA Today.

How disappointing.