Price strategy puts WellPoint in bind

Wall Street Journal (subscription required), September 3, 2008

At WellPoint, the nation's largest health insurer, Chief Executive Angela Braly is attempting to raise premiums enough to placate investors but not so much as to send customers fleeing elsewhere. WellPoint began boosting premiums after a profit warning in March. In the first six months of the year, WellPoint lost 189,000 members in the plans that it insures and the company projects an additional overall 150,000-member decline by December. The problem of how to reassure investors that profit will be maintained without losing business is confronting the entire health-insurance industry.