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High Risk Pools make Taxpayers, not Insurance Companies, to pay for Preexisting Conditions.
You will be hearing a lot about high risk pools, but you won’t be told how bad they are.
Even worse, it forces the public to pay for the sick, in tax dollars and higher insurance premiums, while private insurance companies rake in billions covering healthy people. Seriously, you buying this?
Democrats apparently have not done their homework, because otherwise they would shouting on every roof top blaming Republicans for shifting the cost of preexisting conditions off onto taxpayers. Yup, some of the same taxpayers who complained about paying for someone else’s medical care with their hard earn money.
Here’s the GOP health care reform scam:
The plan includes $10 billion per year in “state innovation grants,” which are a version of high-risk pools to help sick people get coverage and stabilize premiums but appear to allow for a broader array of uses for the money by states. Prior to the passage of the Affordable Care Act, however, many of these state plans ended up being so expensive, because they covered only sick patients, that they had to cap enrollment.
To get a handle on just what this means…look at what happened before the ACA:
High-risk pools have been tried before, with mixed results. It worked like this:
1. Sick people with problems ranging from arthritis to congestive heart failure were placed in a separate insurance pool, with government and insurance companies helping to cover costs.
2. They were also charged higher rates, up to double the amount paid by consumers with no serious ailments.
3. 30 states that had high-risk pools, net losses piled up to more than $1.2 billion in 2011, the height of the pools before the Affordable Care Act took full effect.
4. The programs covered about 225,000 Americans back then.
5. Most pools had lifetime and annual limits on coverage. Some imposed waiting periods of up to a year for coverage of a pre-existing condition.
6. Some states offered income-based assistance. Most did not.
7. In every state that ran a high-risk pool in 2011, medical expenses outpaced premiums, and losses averaged $5,500 per enrollee. States used fees and taxes to make up the difference.
Health care base on Ideology, not Reality:
The nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation estimates that 27 percent of adults under age 65 have health conditions that would likely leave them uninsurable under practices that existed before the health care overhaul. Affordability is another matter, and would be handled differently in each state under the GOP plan.
A former liberal radio talk host who likes to ask the “follow-up question” at Democurmudgeon.blogspot.com
Source: http://democurmudgeon.blogspot.com/2017/02/high-risk-pools-make-taxpayers-not.html
