You CAN get insurance for just about anything. Maybe not through your local insurance broker. If you want it badly enough, you can get it. It’s called ‘high risk medical insurance’. Google it. You can get insurance for pretty much anything, so long as yoou’re willing to pay an outrageous premium.
Are you confusing the Health Exchange with the new public insurance?
The national health exchange will let you pick a provider from particpating private insurers OR enroll in the public health insurance plan.
Nevada for one has no such option and insurance carriers will not cover people with pre-existing conditions. I am self-employed so getting through an employer won’t work.
I tried for nearly a year to get coverage and with a stack of denial letters, boxed everything up and left the country.
It’s been a good deal for my current carrier in the UK - 6 years of premiums and no claims.
Guys, read what I said. I said that you can get insurance provided you’re willing to pay exhorbitant prices. My whole point was to show that Obama’s plan that insurers cover you even if you have pre-existing conditions means they must cover you at a reasonable price.
This means price controls, which means health insurance shortages. This is why he’s also proposing a new public health insurance system.
But he’s not requiring that, is he? As far as I can tell, he’s setting up a public health insurance system which will be funded with taxpayer dollars and money that employers are REQUIRED to pay to support if they don’t offer their own health care programs. This by definition means he won’t be supporting the system through premiums alone. So private health insurers are going to be forced to compete against a public system which is running at a loss. Good luck to them.
Care to retract that? Or prove to me that I’m wrong?
You know, for someone who’s trying to play “Gotcha”, you really want to be careful about the claims you make. I haven’t read a single article about Obama’s health plan on National Review. The message I posted above came from my own analysis of his published plans, and not from any other writer.
I actually don’t know what you’re talking about now. What interview? What Commonwealth doctors? I went right to the source material and drew my own conclusions. Have you got a cite to the article you’re talking about?
Sam, Desert Nomad read what you said and he answered that no, no one was willing to cover him at any price. If have a source that contradicts him, then please provide it.
But yes, the goal is affordable universal health care coverage for all, including those need healthcare. So yes, if the private system is to be used to accomplish that goal, then those carriers must cover those higher risk individuals at an affordable cost. The alternative is either that we continue as is, leaving those who may actually need health care uninsured, and the expense of caring for their eventual catastrophes buried in everyone else’s charges, or expanding a safety net wide enough to have the government cover them selectively, or a true national government-run plan. All of the plans floated by the Democrats this year concluded that the first option was the best. McCain prefers the second.
Insurers currently take on all comers, including high riskers, when they offer plans to employers. They take on the entire pool of MegaCorp’s employees for the same cost per individual. The acturarials keep tabs and they do indeed routinely pass the average increased expenses of paying for high riskers on to the cost of the product for all, including the lowest riskers. Mind you they’d love to be able to cover only the low risk individuals employed by MegaCorp, but they are not allowed to.
That is not “price controls” and neither would be requiring the same for the population at large. It has not resulted in “insurance shortages” for those plans, it would not for individual plans, and there is no reason to imagine it would. (Other than the political need to peg a proposal as something it really aint, that is.)
You make several speculative leaps about Obama’s plan and then some even more specious conclusions. I do see in the plan that individuals of lower income groups will be subsidized to varying degrees to help them purchase health insurance no matter from whom they purchase it (“an income-related Federal subsidy”). Employers “pay or play” contribution will probably not even be quite enough for that, let alone enough to subsidize a massive new program that will offer such artificially low prices as to drive the private carriers out of the business.
And if you’d have bothered to click on my provided cite you’d see the article that I reference that made your original points. And hey, it’s only to be expected as trying to falsely paint this plan as an “extreme government-run” model is the GOP’s party line. Which of course is all that [McCain](one-size-fits-all, big-government takeover of health care.) can come up with too. But you came up with this false portrayal all on your own? I believe you, but only because Boogey-Manning any proposal as a Big Gubbermint take-over has become such a knee-jerk response of the Right. The Right will shove that circle peg into that square hole come Hell or High Water.
I don’t know what a final proposal will actually look like and hope that it is different in some critical ways from what Obama has put out. Hillary’s plan was better and I hope that the mandate is included eventually. I do appreciate McCain’s attempt to peel ourselves away from a failed employer-provided model with modification of the how we subsidize the purchase of health insurance from payroll tax exemptions to more equitable individual tax credits for individual purchase.
We’ll see what actually happens and if the best of each can be combined. I won’t hold my breath.
No it doesn’t mean price controls. If you are covered by insurance, and get an expensive condition, then they pay at current rates. Why would an insurance company not cover pre-existing conditions? If one did, and others did not, then uninsured people with conditions would migrate to the company that covered them, and they would be at a disadvantage. If it were mandated to cover pre-existing conditions, then all companies would be on equal footing, and there would be no incentive for people with issues to go to one over the other. There is an issue that people without insurance by choice (the young) would immediately sign up once they got sick, which is an argument for Clinton’s mandated coverage for all and against Obama’s plan. But that is gaming the system as a whole, not one particular company.
When my company switches insurance companies, the new one covers pre-existing conditions, no problem.
But if they insured you before you developed the condition, then they took an actuarial risk. If they can get a statistical average sampling of people as their customer base, then some will develop conditions and be more expensive to treat, while others will be healthier than the statistical average, and in the end it all balances out.
Because if you have a known expensive condition, and the company has to charge you insurance rates equal to those who have only average risks, then the insurance company will lose money by taking you on as a customer.
This is true, so long as all the insurance plans are equally priced, offer equal services, and no company is allowed to opt out. This removes all choice from the insurance market. I can’t get premium health insurance, I can’t choose lower-cost health insurance and assume some risks for myself, and I can’t benefit financially from leading a healthier life.
And this is a perfect example of Hayek’s Road to Serfdom. Once you mandate that all insurers must cover pre-existing conditions, you find you have to start mandating that they have equal coverage. Then you realize that there’s no incentive for healthy people to pay for insurance until they get sick, so you have to force them to ensure themselves. Regulations beget more regulations. This is why Obama’s plan also requires extensive reporting to the government (so much for lowered paperwork costs), mandated treatment plans, and other regulations. It’s also why Hillary’s task force wound up with over 1,000 pages of regulations before they threw in the towel.
What’s more, now that you’ve mandated that young healthy people must take insurance, you have to realize that what you have now created is a social welfare system in which young healthy people are paying more money than they should have to, in order to cover the health care of sicker, older people. This is no longer ‘insurance’ by any stretch of the imagination - it’s simply another government social welfare program with ‘insurance’ companies as middlemen.
It’s also regressive in the sense that you are forcing young people to pay more into the system than they get out, and allowing older people to pay less than they take. Since older people tend to be wealthier, you’ve created a regressive tax system much like the payroll tax. And like the payroll tax, as the population ages more and more burden will be put on the young, healthy people.
And here’s what’s going to happen next - Since the government is ponying up the tab for some of this health care, there will be increasing pressure to regulate costs through mandating the kind of coverage that can be done, and pressure to start forcing the population to be healthier. Now you have a justification for a ‘fat tax’ - hey, your health costs me, because I have to pay for your health care, so now I have a right to tell you how you must care for your own body. We hear this kind of talk all the time in Canada. To me, this is one of the most frightening aspects of government-run health care - once ‘society’ is picking up the cheque for your health care, ‘society’ has a vested interest in telling you how you must care for your body.
Then, you’ll find that wealthy people skip this whole mess and pay for their own medical care, allowing them to skip the queues and mandated treatment plans. So doctors who don’t work in the government-managed system will make more money, and this will attract the best doctors. Then there will be an outcry that the wealthy are stripping the system of the best and brightest, and demands will increase to do away with the ‘two-tier’ system that leaves the lemons for the poor and middle class.
That’s the trajectory most public health care systems head down, and that’s why Canada wound up with the single-payer system we have.
Because again, by setting up that deal ahead of time, they take a risk that the employee pool will be higher risk than average, but they also have an equal chance that it will be lower risk than average. This is why insurance pooling works.
What Obama wants to do is forbid insurance companies from turning away individuals with pre-existing conditions. In this case, the insurance company knows for a fact that you are going to cost them more money than the average person. They have to take you as a customer at a loss. They are now agents of the welfare state, and have had their choice to insure who they want taken away from them. They also will not be able to offer better coverage than anyone else, because if they do all the sick people will flock to them and destroy their business. So it’s going to be one-size-fits all.
31 states currently have high-risk insurance pools for people with pre-existing conditions. Outside of that framework, you can get insurance for *anything if you are willing to pay enough. Evel Knieval could get health insurance for jumping his motorcyle. It was just hella expensive.
Again, I don’t expect the average person do that. I explicitly said that such insurance can be had provided you are willing to pay exhorbitant prices. My point was not that anyone can easily get insurance, but that when Obama says that he will force insurance companies to take people with pre-existing conditions, what he means is that they must take them and NOT charge them exhorbitant prices for it. If I have a pre-existing condition that requires 100 days of hospitalization a year, at $800/day, Obama’s not going to let an insurance company charge me $80,000/yr for insurance, is he?