Healthy consumers could see insurance rates double or even triple when they look for individual coverage under the federal health law later this year, while the premiums paid by sicker people are set to become more affordable, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of coverage to be sold on the law’s new exchanges.
And
The exchanges, the centerpiece of President Barack Obama’s health-care law, look likely to offer few if any of the cut-rate policies that healthy people can now buy….
At the same time, the top prices look to be within reach for many people who previously faced sky-high premiums because of chronic illnesses or who couldn’t buy insurance at all.
And
Several big provisions in the law taking effect in six months affect rates for the estimated 20% of Americans who don’t have coverage through an employer, Medicare or Medicaid. Plans must be available to consumers regardless of their health and must cover certain items such as hospitalization, maternity care and prescription drugs.
This is naked wealth redistribution—welfare—paid for, in part, on the backs of the young and healthy, who need no insurance. Moreover, these young, as all Americans, ought to be able to choose for themselves the risks they’re willing to run; Government has no role to play here.
The rest of this welfare is paid for by the insurers: those policies that are required to be available to all comers, in the emergency rooms, must be provided by the insurers under Obamacare, at premiums that have nothing to do with the risk being covered—including the actual now-prior existing condition diagnosed in those ERs. Watch the losses mount as these policies are canceled as soon as the emergency is past.
The Wall Street Journal article goes on, but these are the highlights.
There are other redistribution facets to Obamacare that are nor mentioned in the article, also. Unmentioned here is another massive welfare payment suite, paid for by insurers: all of that coverage, all of those plans “that must be available…regardless of health,” must be available in hospital emergency rooms, and they must be buyable in real-time. Watch the insurers’ losses mount as these policies are canceled as soon as the “emergency” is past.
Another thing that’s missing is the availability to the poor and much of the middle class of Health Savings Accounts. True enough, these folks don’t have much money to put aside, but they are functionally prevented from putting away any of what they do have for their future health problems by the requirements for having HSAs at all. Government won’t allow these except for those with a high-deductible policy—typically in the $3,000 and up range. Our poor and much of our middle class can’t afford that much out of pocket expense, so they’re denied the opportunity to save for their own future health. Deeper into the middle class, individuals and families still have other imperatives that limit their willingness to spend that much to get an HSA.
Certainly, with actual insurance in a free market, high risk pools will have higher premiums, but they’ll be able to get policies—even those with preexisting conditions. But the rest of the rates will go down, and the market as a whole will go down, even with the higher premiums for higher risks. A broader range of policies will exist, also.
These are the wages of welfare dishonestly masqueraded as insurance.