ObamaCare Changes the Insurance You Now Have
In his Big Speech to the joint session of Congress last week President Obama said:
First, if you are among the hundreds of millions of Americans who already have health insurance…nothing in this plan will require you or your employer to change the coverage or the doctor you have. Let me repeat this: nothing in our plan requires you to change what you have.
But in his very next sentence the President began to describe how your insurance company would be required, by law, to change the terms of, and increase the cost of the policy you have.
What this plan will do is to make the insurance you have work better for you. They will no longer be able to place some arbitrary cap on the amount of coverage you can receive in a given year or a lifetime.
Most insurance policies do have caps, usually between $500,000 and $1 million per year. The purpose of the cap is to limit the company’s risk so it can charge a lower premium. If the company’s risk is no longer limited then it will have to charge higher premiums.
Insurance companies will be required to cover, with no extra charge, routine checkups and preventive care, like mammograms and colonoscopies.
What if the policy you now have doesn’t include free checkups and every type of “preventive care” Obama’s panel of regulators eventually decrees? The insurance company will have no other option but to increase the premium you and/or your employer pays.
We will place a limit on how much you can be charged for out-of-pocket expenses
But the premium you and/or your employer pay is a direct function of out-of-pocket deductibles and co-pays. The more you are willing to pay out-of-pocket, the lower the premium. As out-of-pocket limits are reduced, premiums increase, dramatically. The increased premium can equal or even exceed the potential out-of-pocket savings.
It costs the insurance company nearly as much to process a claim for a $50 “preventive care” service as it does to process a claim for a $5,000 surgery. Thus premium savings for policies with high deductibles or high co-pays are substantial. People who pay for their own insurance nearly always choose higher deductibles and/or co-pays because they consider the trade offs in lower premiums.
Each of these changes the President said would “make your insurance work better” will substantially increase the cost of your policy.
Thus, it won’t be the same insurance you have now. It will be different insurance, with different limits, co-pays, deductibles, and coverages. And most likely the premium will go up.
Indeed, the new ObamaCare version of your policy might look more like a policy you decided against, when you selected the insurance you have now.
The insurance CEOs must love this blog.
President Obama will put a much needed leash the insurance companies that have been ripping us off for a lifetime.
Read the facts. Insurance going up 20% or 30% EACH YEAR! We can’t live with this massive theft.
We pay more for health care than any other country but we rank 50th in the world.
The insurance companies are lucky the president doesn’t call out federal prosecutors to jail the CEOs and seize the offices.
So this blog is in favor of caps on care? In favor of pricing people out of the preventive care so they get sick and cost even more? in favor of unlimited out of pocket charges that drive a family into bankruptcy?
What the hell good is the kind of health insurance you favor?
SHEESH!
Health care “insurance” is not insurance at all. Its a pay-for-everything health maintenance scheme.
If auto insurance covered gas, oil changes, car washing, new tires, air filters etc its premium cost would skyrocket. Same with homeowners insurance.
If people like a thousand brain cells (maybe) could understand this we might be able to make real progress on the issue, rather than just making mind numbingly stupid rants about insurance executives.