“For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. Some people, eager for money, have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs” (1 Timothy 6:10).
Aside from the fraud highlighted in this article, there is the fundamental underlying fraud of the overall Obamacare concept.
What is needed is some transparency - explicit accounting for cross-subsidies between insureds, reported to individual policyholders.
I am over 65 and now on Medicare coverage, but between the time I was 58 and 65 I was covered initially by costly obamacare plans when the coverage I was getting under my wife’s corporate benefits ended as she reached 65. As a high-income self-employed professional, I was abused by the Bronze/Silver/Gold tricotomy of Obamacare plans. I went from a premium of about $300/month under my wife’s coverage (albeit subsidized by her corporate employer) to $1500/month in the first year of my Obamacare coverage for a Silver plan. For several years, it increased precipitously to the point where I switched to a health sharing plan - one of the five grandfathered into Obamacare. When I looked at the $1500 premium that first year, I could surmise that perhaps $800 was for my own care, and $700 was to buy down the cost of plans for my neighbors. But you couldn’t be certain. For them to charge me $1500 as a monthly premium, someone had to know the cost of my coverage and the amount of the subsidy I was paying. That should be made explicit in a disclosure to all insureds under Obamacare.
The political alliance of Obamacare, the thing that allowed it to be passed by a single vote, was this obfuscation of the amount that was going to buy down the policies of others. If that information were made available to all insureds, the political firestorm that would result would repeal Obamacare in months.
Check yo zip code’