What Trump supports and he has only said it about ten thousand times is opening up markets across state lines to increase competition among insurance companies. When companies have a near monopoly their is no incentive for them to force providers to keep expenses down. He has said that he also wants to continue encouraging health savings plans.
My wife was in a serious car crash... she had to have three discs in her neck fused together. After the surgery she spent a short time in recovery and then her gurney was pushed into the hall and someone else pushed her off to the side to get her out of the way. And there she sat for the next five hours. She didn’t get her medication or any attention for five hours. Of course I was waiting to see her and the receptionist in the waiting area kept making up stuff to keep me appeased. Finally, I forced them to track her down.
A month later we got a copy of the bills and they came to over $80,000 dollars. As I went over it I noticed that the bulk of the hospital charges were for six hours spent in in “intensive care”. I called the hospital and they of course denied that the charges were bogus. So I called the insurance company and explained what happened which is why I am posting this.
They said that if there was a problem with the bill that it was our responsibility to get it straightened out, and that they were not going to “waste” any of their time to try and do it. You see to “save” money my employer actually paid the bills and the insurance company just administered the money and kept a percentage. The more they paid out, the more they got paid. It took me over a year, but I finally got the charges from the hospital reduced by over half.
This is the type of non-competitive BS that has allowed healthcare expenses to go up unchecked. Since I retired, my wife and I have been using Christian Healthcare Ministries which has an exemption from the “mandate”... it costs a quarter of what we were paying for Health Insurance and protects our financial interests better than what our insurance did. We also have a healthcare savings plan that has tax advantages for us. So even with the “mandate” we have not been forced to buy an “Obamacare” plan. Do you think that Trump is going to take that away?
Cruz has already proposed doing both those things too, but he doesn’t start pushing the idea that everybody has to be covered with insurance backed up by government funding. That is where Trump goes off the rails. How does Trump stop people from freeloading and not buying insurance, then just taking the government coverage when they get sick? I don’t know what Trump’s going to do so I can’t speculate on what the effects of it will be.
It sounds like you shopped around and found a good plan, so that’s how the free market should work. Luckily the loophole exception from Obamacare was in place there, because I think your company is not technically an “insurer.” If Obamacare is repealed, the price of your plan should go down because insurers won’t have to take on people with pre-existing conditions. As it is now, I think there is some kind of scheme within Obamacare to use the mandate penalties to help cover losses of insurers with payours if they take on too many patients with pre-existing conditions...no idea how that’s working out in practice at this point.