[USNBandit]

The Washington site will let you look at rates, and they are bad. The premiums, pre-subsidy, look pretty normal. Then you look at the deductibles and you realized that bronze and silver plans start looking like catastrophic care, with maternity and mental coverage. I think many families will find themselves paying premiums and not seeing a dime paid by insurance.

The best silver plan I saw still had a $2500 individual/$5000 family deductible. Figure the kids get one well check a year, and everybody sees the doctor maybe three times a year when they get sick. A family of four doesn't get there. Maybe if mom goes in for a normal female checkup and a mammogram?

[ArmstedFragg]

For a couple of decades, health insurance hasn’t been true insurance but instead has been a form of pre-paid medical care. When you subtracted the amount necessary to cover a potential catastrophic claim, and the amount necessary to process claims, the left over portion of your premium was usually somewhere around the average amount of services your cohort used. With all of the mandates that are now attached, that computation is meaningless. But, hey, we wouldn’t want to have Fluke’s friend pay for her own birth control would we? That’d be m-e-a-n.