Press Release: 8/14/2025
Rebutting Blue Cross Blue Shield
For Immediate Release
Contact: Kimberley Connors, Executive Director, Mass-Care, 617-297-8011, director@masscare.org
Mass-Care has issued the following statement rebutting Blue Cross Blue Shield regarding the health care crisis:
In a July 27, 2025, article for the CommonWealth Beacon (https://commonwealthbeacon.org/opinion/the-urgency-of-tackling-health-care-affordability/), Sarah Iselin, CEO of Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts, laid out a list showing there is a health care crisis in Massachusetts. This list should be familiar to many people as 40% of people report delaying needed medical care due to the cost, and businesses report having to pay back-breaking insurance costs.
We believe her list is incomplete.
Missing from her list is the high cost of health insurance. Insurance companies, including those like Blue Cross Blue Shield which are deemed not-for-profit, pay exorbitant salaries and then deny health care so that their costs remain low.
Also missing from her list is the crisis that every city and town is going through in setting their budgets as they are faced with 9-20% increases in health insurance costs. Price gouging by pharmaceutical companies is also missing.
Additionally, it is important to understand that while an insurer may be “not-for-profit”, it doesn’t mean they don’t make “profit”. It means that any profits must be re-invested into the organization rather than used to pay shareholders. Thus, profits that are made can be and are used to pay high salaries, medical directorships, stipends for administrative services, consulting fees, and more that are disguised under the not-for-profit term.
Consider this: in 2023 Sarah Iselin was paid $6,209,738 in total compensation. Six million dollars is pretty good take-home pay. Also in 2023, the previous CEO Andrew Dreyfus received $14,492,982. Fourteen million is a nice retirement package. The Chief Financial Officer received $3.7 million and the Senior VP received $3.2 million. (These figures are from BCBS Form 990 for the year 2023.)
CEO Iselin calls for the State to enforce “the health care spending benchmark” and limit provider cost increases to 3.6%. Apparently she only wants to limit hospital and doctor increases, not health insurance company increases.
This month, the State announced the health insurance rate increases that it is allowing insurance companies that provide insurance for the “merged market”. This is where small towns and small businesses go to get health insurance for their employees. Blue Cross had submitted a request for a rate increase of 12.9%. This has been denied by the State, but they have allowed other insurance companies increases of up to 13%. (In our opinion this is an outrageous dereliction of duty by the State.) Perhaps Blue Cross should have heeded its own advice and limited their request to the benchmark of 3.6%.
We need systemic change. The real solution to the health care crisis in Massachusetts is the passage of the Massachusetts Medicare for All legislation, H.1405 and S.860.
This legislation would remove health insurance companies from being the purveyors of health care in Massachusetts, where insurers gate-keep a commodity to be sold rather than a critical service that is a basic human right.
In their place the legislation would set up a Massachusetts Health Care Trust that would pay all health care bills for all residents of Massachusetts. By having one single payer of health care and eliminating the insurance industry profit, Massachusetts would save $37.36 billion in health care spending in the first year. That is while eliminating all co-pays and deductibles and covering eyeglasses, dental, hearing aids, prescription drugs, and home health care. https://masscare.org/economic-analysis/
The Trust Fund would also have the power to bargain with pharmaceutical companies (like the Veterans Administration does), thus lowering the cost of drugs.
Insurance companies currently are blaming their rate increases on “weight loss drugs” like Ozempic. What is not talked about is the price gouging by pharmaceutical companies.
“It's well-known that drug prices in the US are the highest in the world. Medications routinely prescribed in the US cost only a fraction of their US price in other countries. In this case, a 1-month supply of Ozempic, when shipped to the US from an online Canadian pharmacy, typically costs about $250, whereas the same drug costs nearly $1000 in the US for individuals bearing the entire cost of the medication out-of-pocket.” https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/991967
Blue Cross likes to boast that they only keep 10% of the revenues for themselves. We would expect the Trust fund would operate like Medicare and only have a 2-3% overhead. There would be no $6 million compensation packages for CEOs.
Guy Qvistgaard, Co-Chair of Mass-Care, who retired from Kaiser Permanente and was a Sr. VP of Hospital and Health Plan Operations in the San Francisco Bay Area, states that “health plans can declare large losses in one year and still remain financially viable and solvent by operating on the accumulated earnings of prior years. Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts HMO Blue reported a total surplus of $2,381,695,000 as of December 31, 2023. This allows the organization to continue to pay exorbitant salaries.”
Proposed single-payer health care transforms the patient/provider experience to center on the actual care a patient receives, not the claims administration process as described in Jay Feinman’s book, Delay, Deny, Defend.
The Boston Globe examined nearly 9,000 contributions made last year to Gov. Healey, Speaker Mariano, and Pres. Spilka, as well as the House’s No. 2 Democrat, Majority Leader Michael Moran, and the Legislature’s two budget chiefs — a group of lawmakers who exert an outsize influence over what becomes law. The Globe found that collectively, the six most powerful Democrats raised just under $3 million over the course of 2024. Within that $3 million, contributions from the health care and insurance industries amounted to $356,000 in 2024.
The only holdup to establishing a single payer system in Massachusetts is a legislature that cares more about insurance company profits and donations then they do about the health and financial well-being of the residents of Massachusetts.
At the end of her article, Sarah Iselin ironically says, “Learn from the collapse of Steward Health Care to ensure for-profit health care organizations in our state enhance the quality of care and decrease the cost.” What we have learned from the Steward debacle and from the crisis of double-digit health insurance costs is that for-profit health care organizations have no place in the delivery of health care. That includes so-called “not-for-profit” insurance companies.
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Mass-Care’s mission is to establish a Single Payer health care system in Massachusetts so that all residents of the Commonwealth will have access to comprehensive, quality, and equitable health care, publicly financed and free of out-of-pocket cost at point-of-care, with free choice of practitioners, because it is basic to life and human dignity. The Mass-Care Coalition is now over 100 organizations.
www.masscare.org / 617-297-8011 / info@masscare.org