Mission Accomplished, Part II
As noted in a previous post, the principal reason for health reform (affirmed repeatedly by its advocates) is pre-existing conditions as a barrier to health insurance. As of the end of March, 18,313 people (out of a US population of 310 million) have joined newly created risk pools, paying no more premium than healthy people pay. Problem solved: without spending $1 trillion, without creating 159 new regulatory agencies and without telling everyone in America what kind of health insurance we all must have.
Health reform was only partly about helping people with pre-existing conditions. It was primarily to change the health insurance landscape to the liking of left-leaning policy makers and their advisors. The Affordable Care Act will expand Medicaid and will create subsidies (and cross-subsidies) for the sick and moderate-income families. It will force young, healthy individuals into the market at premiums that are not much different than older, less healthy individuals will pay. It will also force businesses over a certain size to provide coverage. Many of these ideas come with risks for a variety of different reasons. But they are ideas progressives have been dreaming about for decades.
Great post. We need constant reminders of what this is all about.
This is truly unbelievable. We are giving government control of the entire health care system because of the problems of 18,000 people. Beam me up Scotty. There’s no intelligent life down here.
This would be funny if it were not so sad.
Let me see if I understand this. To solve the problems of 18,000 people we are going to completely regulate the health insurance of 310 million?
The real number of people with pre-existing problems might be less than 18,000 people.
There is no way that the ObamaCare pools can really tell if someone was uinsured for the requisite amount of time. As with SCHIP/Medicaid expansions, people may drop/not enroll in a more expensive policy (COBRA, insurer of last resort, business group of one) in order to get the lower rates offered by the ObamaCare pools.