To the Editor:

This is an open letter to Blue Cross/Blue Shield of North Carolina:

I just received the card you told me to look for in your robo call wanting me to write Sen. Kay Hagan. You only mentioned Sen. Hagan so I assume Sen. Richard Burr is already supporting your profits over the actual health care of North Carolinians.

I am getting ready to go into my fourth year of Medicare as my health insurance plan. In the three years I have had that plan, my government run part A premium has increased 11 percent. In those same three years, I have had BC/BS part B coverage and my premium has increased 27 percent, and your CEO has received hundreds of thousands of dollars in raises and over a million dollars in bonuses. He even moved the jobs of processing my premium payment to Atlanta for a year. (I see he had to move that back to Charlotte this year, so apparently I wasn’t the only one who noticed.)

In each of the last two years, the companies providing my part D have increased my premium 50 percent, as well as increasing my deductible and some co-pays. I haven’t heard from BC/BS yet to see what my increase for this year will be.

As near as I can tell, none of this increased cost has improved the quality of actual health care I receive. Private insurance companies cannot fix my broken arm, treat my infection, take out my gall bladder or replace my hip. The only “service” you provide is deciding whether or not you are going to help me pay for the care my doctor and I decide I need. Since paying claims is a “cost” to you, thereby decreasing your profits, what incentive is there for you to pay or to sign up people who are going to cost you money? So tell me again why private health insurance is my best “option” for health care.

In addition you are spending millions in lobbying and advertising trying to “maintain your profitability.” I’m thinking that money would buy a lot of health care for the citizens of North Carolina. Medicare part A doesn’t have those “costs.”

To quote your flyer, “No matter what you call it, if the federal government intervenes in the private health insurance market, it’s a slippery slope to a single-payer system. Who wants that?” Well guess what? I want a single-payer system and so do most of those 46 million people who aren’t covered because companies like yours care more about profits than actual health care. Why would I want to keep sending more and more money in premiums to companies who are giving me less and less in return?

For-profit private insurance companies providing affordable access to health care is an oxymoron. In the wealthiest country on earth that claims as some of its founding principles equality for all, certain unalienable rights like life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness (Declaration of Independence), or the establishment of Justice and the promotion of the general Welfare (Preamble of the Constitution), health care as a commodity for profit instead of every citizens’ right is unconscionable.

A nation that puts the profits of corporations above the lives of 44,789 people who die each year in this country because they can’t pay for treatment that would cure them is worshipping the false god of the golden calf, and it is immoral.

Jane Harrison

Waynesville