Let me explain it to you like this. Is anyone jumping in to insure the folks who aren’t insured today, at a reasonable rate? Okay, then you know who will jump in to give you reasonable rate when businesses no longer provide the service. Nobody.
You will be paying over a $1000 per month for family coverage.
Now, do you think your employer will raise your wages since they won’t be providing health insurance any longer? If so, put down the bong pipe.
This is just one of the last employment perks to be stripped from employees.
We just priced adding me to my wife’s coverage at work. For one person it was going to be $380.00 per month without dental and optical coverage. And this wasn’t a premium coverage plan.
What does your wife pay? She’s the employee.
That premium does seem high. How much is individual ins for you?
Yes, with more competition, insurance rates will go down ... just like any other commodity or service.
First of all, Yes. Many people who are uninsured could get health care at reasonable costs. For example, the Frost family, assuming they didn't have some preconditions BEFORE Their accident, had private medical plans available for as little as 400 a month or so. It's just that most people who don't have insurance aren't LOOKING for insurance, because they don't want to spend ANYTHING.
Second of all, many of those, like the Frosts, qualify for government plans, either medicaid/medicare or SCHIPS or other state programs. They may not have figured it out or signed up, but if they bothered to look, they'd be covered. So why would ANY private company go to the trouble and expense of setting up a reasonable-cost child insurance plan for people making $50,000 a year, when the insurance company knows that anybody at that range that LOOKS for insurance is going to find a FREE SCHIP program that the private company can't compete with.
Third, once you eliminate the pool of people who simply don't want insurance, and people who if they bothered to look would get free insurance from the government, there's also people who if they looked would find their employer insurance is a great deal. Once again, a private company isn't going to make money tailoring a plan for people who COULD buy from their company, since they can't compete.
Fourth, now that you've eliminated all those people, you are left with such a small number of people, scattered around the country, that it's hard to even target them for advertising. And that group includes a lot of people that WOULD be expensive to insure, which is why they got dropped out of the equation. And yet there ARE some companies going after these people -- it's just that the total market is too small to encourage a lot of competition.
So it is impossible to take what we see today and use it to picture what would happen if companies were forbidden to offer insurance, and if the government stopped running insurance programs.