Anthem Blue Cross—how to have your rate hike cake and eat it, too

Here’s the way the insurance rate hike game is played in California: Anthem Blue Cross said it would hike rates 17.9 percent for 640,000 individual policy holders. Sound outrageous? Enter the California Insurance Commissioner who conducts a “review.” Now Anthem Blue Cross has voluntarily reduced the rate hike to 13.8 percent, effective retroactively to Feb. 1. The insurance commissioner crows that he “saved” consumers $54 million. Anthem Blue Cross gets the kind of astronomical rate hike it may have planned to start with. AP