People are missing a key issue, worse than the deductibles and premiums.
“CALLER: I know. And, you know, you also have to be not covered by any insurance plan whatsoever for six months —
RUSH: Before you qualify for this?
CALLER: In order to qualify for this, and —
RUSH: You mean you gotta have no insurance for six months before you can qualify for this boondoggle?
CALLER: Yes.”
Think about how much money is saved by the government as those with life threatening conditions DIE when they can’t afford six months of care on their own.
Thanks to Obamacare, even the option for expensive coverage has been taken away. You have to survive NO coverage for half a year before your serious condition is addressed. No need for “death panels” when costlier patients can be neglected to death.
There’s a little bit of history here:
This program is Obamacare’s effort to standardize state high risk pools. Those pools covered individuals who had no insurance and whose health status was such that no insurance company would write coverage for them. These individuals were generally on MedicAid, or spending their own resources for care (which in many cases means they’ll eventually be on MedicAid).
Because these folks are, or soon will be, filing claims far in excess of the premiums they pay, they’re guaranteed money losers for insurance companies who avoid them like the plague. So the states got into the middle of this and decided to help underwrite the loss so that these folks could have some coverage. They don’t have unlimited resources, so they structured the programs to reduce the big hit from those who didn’t buy insurance, then ran to the pool as soon as they got sick. Without some kind of front end delay, they’d have been inviting people to game the system.
I agree that there’ll be some folks who won’t get care, can’t qualify for the public programs, and won’t spend their own money for their health care. They’re very much in the minority, though. The more common story is those who go broke while they’re waiting for the pool eligibility to kick in.
This is an interim situation. When OCare is fully operational, the folks who would have been in the pools will be mandated to get insurance, and the pools will disappear. At that point we go to “community rating” which, essentially, means you’ll be paying for them in higher premiums.
Unless... somehow... the country comes to its senses and gives this thing the death it deserves.