Obamacare’s coverage mandates increased costs to insurance companies. They’ve responded by narrowing provider networks to avoid increasing prices. So, for the same price as the policy many had pre-Obama, they can now only obtain coverage that narrows their choice of providers.
While the economics of the insurance industry are as you described them, government mandates have now changed the product they’re allowed to sell and for the average consumer that nets out to poorer coverage for the same price. Very few people, for example, would willingly trade losing access to a quality hospital or specialist practice in return for an increase of their lifetime maximum from several million dollars to unlimited, but that’s the trade the government has made for them.
You’re right. The insurance business is a “business” and these companies are not doing this business because they are a benevolent association of some kind to “help out people”. They’re going by the numbers and they’re not about to go bankrupt in their businesses.
SO ... if you take away from them the ability to exclude for pre-existing conditions (which they did before) and they can’t price policies according to specific health problems if they do decide to take someone — then it’s going to cost more.
But, if I’m someone who is coming into this system with a load of pre-existing conditions — I’m going to love the fact that my pre-existing conditions have now been spread throughout the insurance pool. I can NOW get coverage, whereas I couldn’t get it before at any price. However, the insurance companies are going to price it accordingly..
The only way we could have things priced as they were before - is that we all would have to have the insurance companies with policies where they could exclude people, they could price policies sky-high (for those who could afford it) for certain things — and — we would have to have a whole segment of our population be WITHOUT insurance.
In other words, we would have to return to lousier policies where fewer people could ever get coverage and large segments of our population to always be without insurance (then we could have what we had before). That way the insurance industry could basically “cherry-pick” the population for the best risks and exclude everyone else. Then they could “afford” to give those “cherry-picked people” something that could be somewhat affordable,
When you can’t exclude people from the insurance pool and you have to pay out for all pre-existing conditions and everyone is guaranteed the right to get insurance (and thus you can’t have larges swaths of our population WITHOUT insurance) - you’re going to have more expensive policies, because the insurance industry knows how these “numbers” are going to play out. AND ... in addition you’re going to find out that people really didn’t and don’t want to PAY THE BILL no matter what they said before in the past.
Precisely true. Another consequence is that hospitals and networks are frantically trying to cut costs in order to be included in the insurance plans. Of course, to do this they are cutting services and destroying the morale of nurses, technicians and others.