Posted on 10/26/2013 12:46:03 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
Reacting to the troubled rollout of President Obama's health care law, 10 Democratic senators led by New Hampshire's Jeanne Shaheen have signed a letter asking Obama to extend the enrollment period for individuals to purchase insurance through the new exchanges.
However, not only would such an extension require an act of Congress (as I detailed in an earlier post), but it's likely to ruffle the feathers of insurers, who were counting on enrollment ending on March 31.
Why would insurers be bothered? After all, wouldn’t they want to give Americans as much time as possible to purchase their product?
Though that may be the immediate reaction of some, the reality is that a limited open enrollment period is one of the three main ways insurers hope to be able to attract a proper balance of healthy and sick people into the insurance market.
The first two ways that insurers hope to attract young and healthy customers are through the individual mandate (which penalizes people who don’t purchase coverage) and federal subsidies (which make plans cheaper for those with low incomes).
The problem is that if young and healthy individuals don’t qualify for enough subsidies to make insurance affordable, they may decide to simply skip coverage and pay the penalty. If there aren’t any limitations on when they can purchase insurance, that gives them even less incentive to buy. Given that Obamacare doesn’t allow insurers to discriminate against people with pre-existing conditions, healthy people could just wait until they’re sick or injured to purchase coverage.
That’s where the limited open enrollment period comes in. It signals to healthy Americans that if they decide to go uninsured, they’re still taking a risk that if something happens to them outside of open enrollment, they’ll be out of luck.
Insurers worry that even a short-term extension of open enrollment could weaken its effect and distort the risk pool. For instance, what if somebody who didn’t buy insurance in March gets into a major accident in April and decides to purchase coverage during an extended open enrollment?
Keep in mind, insurers already set their rates for 2014 assuming not only that the individual mandate would be in effect, but that open enrollment would end on March 31.
Additionally, pushing back the open enrollment period could compress next year’s timeline, forcing the Department of Health and Human Services to delay other deadlines.
For instance, in 2013, the deadline for insurers to submit their health care plans for government approval was April 30. But creating plans and deciding on rates requires detailed analysis of the risk pool and insurers won't be able to complete that analysis until after open enrollment.
Given all these legal and logistical issues, it isn't surprising that Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius has indicated that the idea isn't being discussed at this time.
Can we now sue the insurers for breach of contract?
Following the thread to Klein's earlier post:
Even if Obama wanted to extend the open enrollment period, he wouldn't be allowed to without an act of Congress — at least if he wants to follow the law he signed.
There you have it! Ø will clearly unilaterally, unconstitutionally, illegally, declare an extension. Unless McConnell and Boehner help him...
“The first two ways that insurers hope to attract young and healthy customers are through the individual mandate (which penalizes people who dont purchase coverage) and federal subsidies (which make plans cheaper for those with low incomes). “
“Attract???
[TRAP]
Fascism
There is a big danger here that insurers are going to get stuck a bunch of unhealthy people who cost them a fortune to insure, without having enough healthy people signing up to dress out the actuarial model
This is ominous because a lot of money can pounded down the coverage rat hole very quickly - this could cause cash flow or insolvency problems for health care insurance companies that could put them into bankruptcy very quickly as soon as next year.
That’s the goal for Zero and his Stalinist cronies. Bankrupt the Insurance industry and then nationalize it.
Is the tax portion (fines) of Obamacare earmarked for a specific purpose or would it just be considered general revenue?
And aren’t we waiting for the first Obamacare tax (fine) to be collected so that all the lawsuits can start. Under the assumption nobody actually has standing to sue until the tax (fine) is actually collected.
Once you sign up they have another sucker with access to his bank account! Plain and simple
Govt running healthcare is bad for the country.
Seeing people moaning for the poor insurance companies is funny cinsidering how they have been treating Americans.
There are no good guys here. There are two bad guys.
Yeah, I'm sure the hospitals will let them die as they claw on the emergency room doors begging for help. /s
I suspect this is all a thought out program to bring on Single Payer as the only thing that can "save" the government health care system. We have already established that it is the government that must design and manage "health care." Even the Republicans will not countenance a free market system that removes the government from the system and makes it therefore more efficient, cheaper, and Constitutional. Any other government"guided" or mandated system will lead to "Single Payer."
You grant the Feds permanent direct access to your bank account(s) when you e-file your income tax. Actually the Feds have that access any time they choose to use it. We will see that in operation when Uncle lays on us whatever the modern version of a “bank holiday” turns out to be. Until that time an e-filer should have a separate account in a separate institution for the sole purpose of e-filing.
“Yeah, I’m sure the hospitals will let them die as they claw on the emergency room doors begging for help. /s “
I had a renter in her late 50’s. She smoked and drank continuously. All day long she lit the next cigarette from the last and this started when she got up. She actually had a beer and a cigarette waiting for her beside the toilet. (I was there early to fix a leak.) She paid for the beer and cigarettes off her EBT card, apparently with fraud. (It took a while to figure this out. But when she abandoned the property in mid-August with the power off, she took the beer but left the refrigerator stocked to the top with EBT purchased steaks. So she was reselling them or trading them.)
Told you that to tell you this. She’d had numerous throat cancer operations and was on chemo; all at taxpayer expense. I wouldn’t have been so torqued but her only reason to treat the cancer was so she could keep smoking. Why should taxpayers have to pay for that?
And the rates will skyrocket for the 2015 period and beyond if they get a lopsided enrollment mix. The young invincibles aren’t going to rush to sign up.
It is not insurance.
It’s wealth transfer.
I thought that one of the "loopholes" was that someone could go for a few years, pay the "penalty/tax" for not buying insurance, and sign up in the emergency room...
What ObamaCare opponents should immediately commence is a Repeal, Replace, and Refund campaign. Candidates for office should be asked to sign a pledge to: (1) vote to repeal this unconstitutional, budget busting dem power-grab; (2) support a workable, market-based replacement; and (3) refund any penalties (or “taxes” in Robert’s pathetic formulation) paid by taxpayers, as well as cancelling any uncollected penalty and interest the IRS shows due.
The word should also be spread to young people that the penalty can only be collected from tax refunds, and they should know that the government cannot file criminal charges or place liens or levies on the taxpayers property or income.
If enough young, healthy Americans get the message, decline to enroll, and take steps to make sure that their withholding or estimated tax payments are adjusted sufficiently to insure that they are not due for a refund, this could be the shove that pushes this teetering monstrosity into total collapse.
Younger taxpayers with relatively high incomes who follow this approach might well, by 2016, owe over $10,000 in uncollected penalties and interest, and would likely be enthusiastic backers of candidates making the pledge, as would any who had actually paid any penalties. (Dems would of course wail and rend their garments if such a campaign were launched, and would claim that the campaign’s proponents were dangerously irresponsible. But they’ll do that whatever we do, as we saw recently in the shutdown/default fiasco.)
An added attraction of this approach: If millions of Americans decrease withholding and estimated tax payments, the Treasury will see a noticeable reduction in tax receipts and, hence, increase in borrowing requirements, further intensifying the pressure on dems to accept repeal.
Insurers do stand to lose a lot.
They lose premiums for the policies they have had to cancel already.
They lose premiums for the delayed Obamacare mandate.
Multiply that by a few million and it adds up to real money losses for the insurers. Next year, look for them to seek special bailouts.
==
Unintended(?) consequences.
Insurers should have considered these kinds of events and developed contingency plans when they were in the Obamacare meetings with Dems in the House, the Senate and the White House.
I wonder what “gun” Obama pointed at their heads.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.