Posted on 11/07/2013 5:48:43 PM PST by grundle
When setting premiums for next year, insurers baked in bigger-than-usual adjustments, driven in large part by a game-changing rule: They can no longer reject people with medical problems.
Popular in consumer polls, the provision in the health law transforms the market for the estimated 14 million Americans who buy their own policies because they don’t get coverage through their jobs. Barred from denying coverage, insurers also can’t demand higher rates from unhealthy people and those deemed high risks because of conditions including obesity, high blood pressure or a previous cancer diagnosis.
But the provision also adds costs. To a larger degree than other requirements of the law, it is fueling the “sticker shock” now being voiced by some consumers about premiums for new policies, say industry experts.
In setting next year’s rates, insurers must factor in “assumptions about who will sign up, high users or healthy people,” said David Axene, a fellow of the Society of Actuaries. “You can imagine who most of the health plans thought would be predominantly signing up.”
Regulatory filings and comments from insurers show they expect that accepting the sick as well as the healthy could raise their claims costs 5 percent to 50 percent or more next year. That “would be the largest single factor” at Blue Shield of California, accounting for about a 20 percent increase in expected claims costs, said Mike Beuoy, director, actuarial services.
(Excerpt) Read more at nbcnews.com ...
It’s ‘popular’ therefore NBC believes it’s automatically a good thing.
You get what you pay for.
Except in 0bamascare.
All these stories about people seeing 30, 40 50% increases in their policy premiums crack me up. I wish I were that lucky.
Healthy people will have to pay for sick people. That is how health insurance works.
Young people will be the greatest losers under this plan and in the long term with our ever-growing list of entitlement commitments. We are indenturing our young even before they leave the womb.
Can’t we just have Ben & Janet create another trillion a year and give it to everybody for free?
Popular?!!
It is popular’ to Klownie the Kenyan.
Pressure Grows For Repeal Of ObamaCare’s Health Insurance Tax (Another $100 Billion)http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3087611/posts
Can you insure a burning barn for fire? Sure, if the owner is willing to pay the total value + expenses as a premium.
Or you can charge his neighbors a lot more for their barn insurance, raising their premiums to level out the cost of the fire.
DUH!...Funny how free enterprise works as opposed to a government that can give you everything..until it runs out of “everything”!
They could...but that cuts out the elite and the middlemen!....as someone once said...Wouldn't be prudent.../s
Healthy people will have to pay for sick people. That is how health insurance works.
It’s not “insurance” if you are already sick. That’s why it is called “coverage” now. Classic leftist word game.
As I read this article it seemed to me as if this was the first time Julie Appleby actually used her two available brain cells to consider why covering pre-existing conditions might lead to higher costs.
Ok. Coverage.
Insurance that sick people won’t get any sicker? People using fewer services than other others.
Anyhow, I believe in fee for service. People should provide for themselves. Government should confiscate less of your income so that you can provide for yourself. Insurance/coverage should be a voluntary thing.
Yes. Because Americans are economically ignorant and emotionally weak. They've been brainwashed into siding against their best interests so as to not appear "mean-spirited" or "intolerant".
Yep. Just continuing the Democrat tradition of slavery.
“When setting premiums for next year, insurers baked in bigger-than-usual adjustments, driven in large part by a game-changing rule: They can no longer reject people with medical problems.”
...well I’m SHOCKED I tell you! Who in the world could have predicted THAT happening?
:/
yeah, that Provision is popular - people liked to hear “sick people will get coverage”
...now they are learning they are the ones who need to pay for it though, so said provision popularity might have a shelf life on it
What would such an auto policy of that insainly comprehensive list of coverages cost a person?
I tell ya these Democrats and Liberals have no concept of dealing with risk in any rational sort of way!!!
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