I was sitting in the company "library" a few days ago when a copy of the WSJ caught my eye, some story about something techy or other. As I was leafing through this particular section ("Lifestyles" I believe) of this fine newspaper (except for the letters and editorials - gak!), lo and behold, a full page color ad for - Aetna! Wow, they must have dropped a bit of coin for that. I wonder how much?
You might not believe the answer. Suffice it to say that there's a lot of private insurer's money that has somehow wound up, not as health care, but as ink on dead trees.
Full disclosure: I'm a single-payer advocate, and as such have little interest in the regulation of private health insurers other than to get rid of them altogether. They are the problem, not the solution (regulated or not).
But it is certainly worth investigating exactly how much of our dough they are wasting telling us how brilliant they are, isn't it?
So here's the ad (I marked it up a little for my co-workers edification):
So how much do PHI's spend on advertising, especially on crap like this which serves no useful purpose as far as I can tell, other than to let the good readers of the WSJ that Aetna is still open for business?
Obviously, this is not something they are happy to reveal. According to this guy:
private insurance company overhead, advertising, executive salaries and shareholder profits, estimated to be $350 billion a year
we could save a lot by just putting an end to most of these ridiculous costs.
Many will argue that you can't just get rid of the PHI's, they are too powerful. I don't buy that argument, but be that as it may you can clearly get rid of stupid advertising and have a lot more dollars delivered to actual health care. After all, cigarettes have been banned from most advertising for decades, and that's a pretty powerful lobby.
How much of that $350 billion is for advertising? I'm afraid my limited toolbox for research (the google) is not very helpful. But I did chance across a few tidbits, such as
The Massachusetts Connector's $3 million-plus campaign includes advertising space on the New England Sports Network, as well as an enrollment education booth at Fenway Park, where the Red Sox play home games
which is rather astonishing given that the program is already deeply in the red by some $147 million. Ah, the genius of the divided risk pool... (snark). The irony of it all is that they call this success, when all that's really happening is people are falling off the private insurance rolls to become clients of the publicly financed program (jeez who would have predicted that outcome?).
For the curious, I provide a closing link to the Aetna advertising campaign that, as far as I can tell, is the progenitor of this particular ad. Maybe you can figure out how much this puppy cost(s) and subtract a pro-rated portion of that from your next premium payment.
Update [2008-11-12 16:3:48 by tegrat]: I've so far seen two more similar ads, so this appears to be a rather costly campaign...