How many of you caught the New York Times admitting that ObamaCare may very well cost a whole lot more for individuals than anyone realized?
You didn’t?
Oh, probably because it was stuck way in the back of the Regional section of the paper:
New York’s insurance system has been a working laboratory for the core provision of the new federal health care law — insurance even for those who are already sick and facing huge medical bills — and an expensive lesson in unplanned consequences. Premiums for individual and small group policies have risen so high that state officials and patients’ advocates say that New York’s extensive insurance safety net for people like Ms. Welles is falling apart.
The problem stems in part from the state’s high medical costs and in part from its stringent requirements for insurance companies in the individual and small group market. In 1993, motivated by stories of suffering AIDS patients, the state became one of the first to require insurers to extend individual or small group coverage to anyone with pre-existing illnesses.
New York also became one of the few states that require insurers within each region of the state to charge the same rates for the same benefits, regardless of whether people are old or young, male or female, smokers or nonsmokers, high risk or low risk.
Healthy people, in effect, began to subsidize people who needed more health care. The healthier customers soon discovered that the high premiums were not worth it and dropped out of the plans. The pool of insured people shrank to the point where many of them had high health care needs. Without healthier people to spread the risk, their premiums skyrocketed, a phenomenon known in the trade as the “adverse selection death spiral.”
~~~Since 2001, the number of people who bought comprehensive individual policies through HMOs in New York has plummeted to about 31,000 from about 128,000, according to the State Insurance Department.
At the same time, New York has the highest average annual premiums for individual policies: $6,630 for single people and $13,296 for families in mid-2009, more than double the nationwide average, according to America’s Health Insurance Plans, an industry group.
But wait! Won’t ObamaCare fix this problem by forcing everyone to buy insurance?
The new federal health care law tries to avoid the death spiral by requiring everyone to have insurance and penalizing those who do not, as well as offering subsidies to low-income customers. But analysts say that provision could prove meaningless if the government does not vigorously enforce the penalties, as insurance companies fear, or if too many people decide it is cheaper to pay the penalty and opt out.
Under the federal law, those who refuse coverage will have to pay an annual penalty of $695 per person, up to $2,085 per family, or 2.5 percent of their household income, whichever is greater. The penalty will be phased in from 2014 to 2016.
Let me see……
Your a healthy young buck whose need for insurance really isn’t all that great….which one you gonna pick? 6600 bucks or a 1000 bucks in penalties?
So What has New York taught us?
This isn’t going to reduce costs, they will rise exponentially, and in the process Obama and friends will have succeeded in their quest to create another welfare state so that the youngsters will love them.
And in the last 15 years, especially the last year, the New York Times has failed to report on the city’s failure….until now.
After it’s too late.
Shocker!
See author page
NY State Assemblyman Dick Gottfried is introducing a bill to expand the currend Child Health Plus and Family Health Plus to insure all New Yorkers. This will break the bank, reduce payment to doctors, thus reducing access to care, and finally result in rationed care for NY. Oh, and did I mention that Mr. Gottfried finds the whole concept of tort reform abhorrent?
Not only that, but the penalty has no enforcement provision; if you don’t pay… the government sends you another bill. Or something. I’ll also be curious to see how they plan to combat abuse of the religious exemption.
Realistically, I think you’ll see the emergence of a two-tier healthcare system: one set of providers will take Medicare, Medicaid, and whatever bargain-basement insurance is the minimum acceptable and affordable under this mandate. Another premium tier will either stop taking insurance entirely, or else stop accepting Medicare and Medicaid and charge enough to price out people who just have basic insurance. And emergency rooms will keep functioning the way they do now: treat everyone (as required by federal law), but ration care by forcing people who show up with non-emergency conditions to wait for hours (very soviet).
There’s a very fundamental error in the plan, which is the assumption that you can get more healthcare just by sort of rearranging people and money a little. Any blockhead can tell you that if you want more healthcare you need more nurses, doctors, hospitals, drugs, &c.; which in turn (given supply and demand) needs you need to provide more incentives, which means more money, which means higher costs.
You read it here first some time ago!
BBARTLOG:how about some 5 plus waiting periods? in some provinces i know in CANADA: bye 🙄