Posted on 11/09/2013 10:33:50 AM PST by artichokegrower
When setting premiums for next year, insurers baked in bigger-than-usual adjustments, driven in large part by a game-changing rule: They can no longer reject people with medical problems.
Popular in consumer polls, the provision in the health law transforms the market for the estimated 14 million Americans who buy their own policies because they don't get coverage through their jobs. Barred from denying coverage, insurers also can't demand higher rates from unhealthy people and those deemed high risks because of conditions including obesity, high blood pressure or a previous cancer diagnosis.
But the provision also adds costs. To a larger degree than other requirements of the law, it is fueling the “sticker shock” now being voiced by some consumers about premiums for new policies, say industry experts.
(Excerpt) Read more at montereyherald.com ...
Nice to know that I a physically active, non smoker with no major health issues will be treated the same a person with a pre-existing heroine addiction.
Your premiums are based on *their* health and their premiums are based on *your* health. Down the rabbit hole we go.........
Funnily enough, the new policies are almost exactly what the first quotes were when I was shopping for insurance for my daughter when you included maternity care.
What are some of the mandates of PelosiCare-ObamaCare-ACA? 1) No difference in rates for men or women. 2) Mandatory maternity coverage. 3) Mandatory coverage for at least one office visit per year.
While I think that covering pre-existing conditions is a portion of the price jump, for a 20 year old woman, that was a more than doubling of the cost of coverage. I never inquired how much that same option would be for a 40 year old woman, but looking at how much the PelosiCare quotes are, it is a good $3,000 a year jump over present coverage.
“Your premiums are based on *their* health and their premiums are based on *your* health.”
Well said
This is the second story I’ve seen that uses the “popular provision” phrasing. The media are trying to camouflage “sticker shock” with words like “popular,” to soften the impact.
Say what you will about Obamacare; at least everyone is being made (painfully) aware of (a large portion of) the costs. In that regard, Obamacare is better than the Canadian health care system, which is mostly paid for by taxes*. That “transparancy” will help keep some pressure on future (inevitable) cost increases.
I wonder how long it will be until that particular “flaw” is corrected. Perhaps much larger tax-payer paid subsidies. Perhaps even a change to a single-payer system.
* Some provinces do charge nominal premiums. There are no deductibles, or co-pays. Here’s the fee structure for British Columbia:
http://www.health.gov.bc.ca/msp/infoben/premium.html
I was finally able to explain the pre-existing condition issue to a brain-dead liberal co-worker, thus: “It’s like betting on the horse after the race has been run.” Strangely the light went on, but so did the denial.
That's well put.
Let me add something. What Obamacare does is reset all relationships, which makes this worse. If someone has been paying for insurance for many years, has been healthy when he signed up, but eventually developed a condition, under the old scheme we'd expect that he should be able to continue with his insurer. It would be wrong for the insurer to take his money for years while he was healthy, and then dump him for his new health problems.
Now comes Obamacare, which disrupts all pre-existing relationships. So, everyone who is ill is now a newcomer with a pre-existing condition. The insurance companies have no legal way (even if they wanted one) to distinguish freeloaders showing up for the first time to be insured when they are sick from long-time customers who deserve a continuing relationship. How screwed up is that?
All this time, the insurance business has been arranged by risk pools and actuarial charts that drive them so that insurance companies can charge lower prices to lower risk clients. By shattering that model - doing away with the ability to subdivide the client base by risk - insurance companies will either go bankrupt, or exist only by government subsidy as front organizations for another social welfare program. Risk assessment and appropriate pricing was a valid business model. Obamacare never was.
And, of course, I agree that Obama and crew could care less.
And this repeats the GM bailout model where investors (such as retirement funds) had paid a premium price for blue-chip stock to have a preferred position if the company went bankrupt, and were set aside by the spurious “bankruptcy” that the Executive Branch did to steal their assets and give the preferred position to unions.
You mean bonds, but yes. The investors who got screwed had bought senior, secured bonds. This means that the bond value was guaranteed by specific assets. In the case of bankruptcy, those secured assets would go toward paying off the bond obligation--the secured bond purchasers wouldn't be lumped in with general creditors. They were definitely ahead of the union pension liabilities. Moreover, the sale of the bonds was done with these specific provisions--called an indenture (the terms of the deal)--specifically because GM was known to be in trouble. Otherwise, they would have carried a much higher coupon rate.
The notion of priority in bankruptcy is elegant, and the product of centuries of experience and law. Obama screwed it up for his union buddies. Now no one trusts the US legal system.
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