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.
So what you’re saying is you’re really for fascist medicine. People can’t be charged less for taking good care of themselves, or for such things as sex reassignment surgery.
And, those who could have afforded health insurance but opted to spend their money on other things can’t be forced to pay for the downside risk of their choices if things go wrong—we have to pay for that.
Except that "coverage" by itself is of little use. There are few situations where the combination of high premiums, high deductibles, and limited networks actually work in favor of the patient. Can't you see that the insurance companies and the government have just tilted the playing field in their favor?
For most people, even people with chronic conditions, paying thousands of dollars a year for a policy with a $10,000 deductible is not a good deal. Particularly when you find that your specialists aren't in the network and you are back to being uninsured with them.
You can be sure that in any market where customers are legally obliged to purchase a product, that the providers, namely the insurance companies and the doctors, hospitals, and other medical providers, will profit handsomely, and the customers will suffer.
Have you ever wondered why hospitals who are supposedly always suffering financially are usually building fancy new buildings and have highly paid staff and management?
One note about the pre-existing condition issue. For about 15 years now, HIPAA has mandated that employees coming off of group plans, and who have maxed out their COBRA coverage, be issued insurance without a pre-existing condition exclusion by any insurer writing individual coverage in their state. Further, many states have had high risk pools that have provided access to such coverage. In both cases, insurance companies have already been able to construct a solution to that need. I actually carried one of those policies for several years, and it cost me about 20 percent more than my COBRA had.
In many cases where pre-existing condition exclusions were given as the reason for being unable to obtain coverage, you’ll discover that the individual experienced sticker shock at the COBRA stage, produced by having to pay the true cost of his insurance, and voluntarily discontinued coverage. The issue there isn’t access, it’s financial, and it’d probably be a heck of a lot cheaper to provide a subsidy for covering folks in that circumstance than to try to socialize those costs.
At any rate, I’d like to see a true accounting of the increased costs associated with the elimination of the pre-existing condition exclusion, compared to things like the “free” preventive care, “free” birth control, pediatric dental coverage, no lifetime maximum, and the rest of the mandates in Obiecare. I suspect they’re a bigger factor in cost increases than patients with pre-existing conditions are. You can buy a lot of blood pressure bills for the cost of maintaining a patient in a permanent vegetative state who would otherwise have maxed out.