Posted on 12/01/2010 8:42:13 AM PST by SeekAndFind
I'm in the business. The insurance companies and pharma practicely wrote Obama's bill.
The pre-ex fear is irrational. Getting people insured who have pre-ex is going to save money. Better to pay for a $15 or 50 maintenece drug per month and a few office visits is cheaper than having that person end up in the hospital when their condition worsens...and since they have no coverage you end up paying higher premiums anyway because the hospital bills private insurnace more to make up for the unisured.
Besides, most pre-ex conditions which insurers decline are very minor conditions that do not cost much.
Which makes me think that they're going to fight tooth and nail to keep the GOP from repealing it, right?
Just the parts they don't like. I have a list of 20 items the insurance companies love about the bill...especially mandatory coverage, standardizing plans, taxing "cadillac plans" (insurance companies want you to pay more out of pocket for minor stuff-they never did like rich benefit plans). co-ops, exchanges etc ..I could go on and on.
The pre-ex is a scare tactic.
What I find fascinating about this whole issue is that we're slowly moving toward a point where two different segments of the insurance industry -- personal/group medical plans and life insurance -- will be directly at odds with each other. If you have a catastrophic illness, your medical insurance carrier has a financial interest in seeing you die quickly . . . while your life insurance company has a financial interest in keeping you alive (and healthy enough to pay your insurance premiums) for decades.
It's really quite remarkable, when you think about it.
Good thinking, AC.
I see you have your “Thinking Cap” on this day?
The whole deal’s a mess.
Ronald Reagan: “Put the government in charge of something, and watch it fall apart.”
There are two factors to the pre-existing conditions that don’t match well the analogy of the car.
Using the analogy of the car accident. OK, so you had an accident, and you didn’t have insurance, so you pay for the accident yourself.
But you realise now how foolish it was, so you go to buy insurance. What if nobody will sell you insurance because of your accident? OK, they might legitimately feel you are a risk for accidents, so maybe they should charge more like they would if you had been a policy-holder and had an accident. But what if they simply wouldn’t cover you at all?
Or what if they decided not to cover the car you had the accident in, because they are afraid that since the car was repaired, it might be more prone to accidents now, and cost more if it gets in another accident?
The point is, a person who for example is diagnosed with diabetes often can’t get health insurance at all. Not just because they don’t want to cover diabetes, but because the fact that you have diabetes may make you a higher risk for all sorts of other illnesses. There’s also the problem that in most states, you couldn’t WRITE a policy that excluded a major illness, because the laws require a basic coverage set. So the insurance companies sometimes have no choice but to reject you.
A reasonable “pre-existing condition” law would allow a company to exclude the pre-existing condition, but also require coverage for all items not directly related to an EXISTING medical ailment. Yes, that would drive up costs slightly for everybody, but it would still meet the definition of “insurance” because those increased risks are only a small possibility, so it’s a “risk pool”.
On the second matter, suppose you have a heart attack. OK, so you want to buy insurance, and the insurance company certainly doesn’t want to pay for the open heart surgery you are about to go through. But, what if the law required that they cover you for any FUTURE heart attacks, once you are deemed medically “repaired” from the existing heart attack?
Again, yes you are a higher risk, and in fact might well have recurring and known expenses because of your heart condition. But that small additional burden to the insurance company isn’t as serious as making them cover hundreds of thousands of dollars of known necessary treatment.
So you might narrowly tailor the “pre-existing condition” law to put some minor burdens on insurance companies as a cost of doing business, without upsetting the apple cart, and keeping in place incentives to buy insurance before you need it, as the initial costs of illness will be a severe “punishment” for not having insurance.
We could even allow the insurance companies to charge additional fees to pre-existing condition applications, to be phased out over a period of time; kind of a “tax” to pay back the higher costs of insuring the pre-existing condition, but eventually letting the people off.
You could then establish risk pools for the actual costs of pre-existing conditions that don’t fall into this new ‘insurance’ regimen, and that could be funded with a retroactive tax charged to people who USE the fund, over a period of years, in proportion to how much money they got out of the fund.
So the fund would work somewhat as a loan, but would also be a government handout, but one that was not “free” and invoked some burden based on ability to pay, and thus still providing incentive for people to buy insurnace ahead of time.
We need some form of pre-existing condition coverage, BECAUSE there is NOT the political will to let people die on the sidewalk in front of a hospital for lack of payment. If you are going to force care-givers to provide care without payment, you have already acceeded to others paying for care, and it’s best to do that in a way that is well-controlled, well-defined, and applies pressure to the users of the system to choose to insure themselves or pay the penalty.
The problem is, we will never allow the “penalty” to be death from illness that we can cure, or even lifetime debilitation. I don’t even think a majority of CONSERVATIVES would choose that form of punishment.
Pre-existing condition insurance makes no sense, but it’s also wildly popular. You can explain to people why it has to be regulated and taxed and not given away for free, but you won’t get support for repeal of Obamacare if people think they will be back to the old ways of not being able to buy insurance because they have some illness already.
Thanks. It’s all a “mess,” to be sure. But I think it’s also the natural consequence of having so many people live very long lives and having a shrinking population base to support them. These problems are really no different than what any Western government or corporation faces with strained pension systems, rising medical costs, etc.
NOW there is...will that condition continue if Obamacare is implemented? Or will the goofy restrictions contradict each other so much that nobody's insurable? Or are we going to end up with no private insurance companies at all, and nothing but some US version of Britain's National Health Service?
Most health insurance carrier stock went up after obmacare was passed. Health insurance companies are going to do very well with it. Like I said the bill was practilly written by the insurance and pharma companies. UHC had a record profit in 3rd qtr 2010.
The latest Food safety bill was written and lobbyed by Monsanto.
If you think insurance companies are going to end up the worse you are canoing up the river denile.
I don’t trust Cantor any farther than I can throw him. He never has a straight answer. Laura Ingrahm grilled him pretty hard a few weeks ago and he was left stammering and almost in tears. Her last words to him were something on the order of “Things have to be different this time we cannot go back to the old way” He was nodding like a bobblehead doll but I don’t buy it and I think she has her doubts also.
“If you think insurance companies are going to end up the worse you are canoing up the river denile.”
Never should we confuse the arguments of particular for general interests. Never was it the case that representatives of private companies represented the free market. They want their piece of the pie, no more.
Insurers and drug companies, as well as the AMA, AARP, etc., in fact are actively lobbying against the ultimate interests of their industries and constituencies in the pursuit of short-term gains. Or, if they’re socialists, in the pursuit of long-term ideological gains. I’m not going to say pre-existing conditions coverage alone will bankrupt all existing insurance providers. Along with the necessary individual mandate, it’ll undoubtedly help them (the big ones, anyway), while hurting the others (that’s the heart of government regulation, isn’t it?). They just won’t be “private” anymore—if that can be said of them now (they haven’t been truly private since, when? Pre-WWII?). They’ll be something else entirely. Not necessarily socialized, but one big step further towards being socialized.
The government will offer nationalized healthcare as solution to the problems which arise from the mandate and pre-existing coverage. That’s the plan, and anyone who doesn’t see it hasn’t been paying attention. Particular companies, even a majority of the industry, may jockey for positions within the new system. They may have even been among the original prosthelytizers for reform. But that means nothing more than that in the olden days railroad, coal, oil, steel, and diverse other companies lobbied for beneficial regulation. They did so because it was thought good for THEM, not for their industry or their consumers. The same holds true today.
The answer for “pre-existing conditions” is tax deductible personal, individual health savings accounts combined with high deductible insurance plans.
But this puts too much power (and responsibility) into the hands of the individual.
Funny thing I heard on FR.
If get a chance to talk to someone who has one of those “coexist” bumper stickers,
say something like - “Wow! I just noticed the hidden message in the spaces between the characters”. And then walk away.
It is “nice” and not “mean” to cover pre-existing conditions,
when you think no deeper than most liberals think about the issue.
You post isn’t making sense.
What are you confused about?
I heard Rush explaining this today, with revisions and all.
However. It’s still idiotic to say, as apparently Cantor did at some Q & A, that taxpayers won’t pay for coverage of pre-existing coverage AND the individual won’t either. Then who the hell will? Excuse me.
The dirty little secret in all this is that most people could get coverage for preexisting conditions, it’s just that it cost more (DUH) and sometimes there were waiting periods for certain types of coverage to kick in.
If you want to keep from getting into this position, insure yourself and your kids as soon as possible. We were always advised to make sure that our kids were insured from the moment of birth — that way no condition is ever pre-existing.
Obamacare is the government forcing everyone to buy insurance.
The truth is the market can “force” people to buy insurance if the government would just leave things alone and responsible people understood that if they leave a gap in their insurance, and they get sick or injured while uninsured, they are going to be uninsurable at regular rates and may be subject to a waiting period — imposed by the market, not the government.
IOW, in addition to everything else that’s wrong with this, is a logic error to say healthcare can only work when most people are insured — but allowing the market to put pressure on people to insure is bad, using the government to force people to insure is good.
Wisest words ever said in this debate.
The fact is that the world is not perfect and sometimes crappola happens.
We all need to be FREE to do the best we can to manage our lives the way we see fit. If we end up in a rough patch, that's what friends and charities and bakesales are for.
I'm sorry if that sounds facetious, but it's true. We could do way better taking care of the poor and down and out in society, not to mention our own families and friends, than the government could ever dream of doing.
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