How Do You Pay For Pre-Existing Conditions? The GOP Plans To Charge More (... So Much More That Tens Of Millions Of Americans Won't Be Able To Afford Insurance)
The Gist: Although statistics vary, the insurance industry -- prior to Obamacare -- denied health coverage to between 9 and 25 million Americans.
Another demographic demonstrates that half of Americans say they cannot afford a monthly health insurance premium greater than $100.00.
More Than Half Of Americans Say they Can't Afford To Pay Over $100.00 Per Month For Insurance
http://www.cnbc.com/2016/11/18/more-than-half-of-us-says-they-cant-afford-to-pay-over-100-per-month-for-health-insurance.html
http://www.cnbc.com/2016/11/18/more-than-half-of-us-says-they-cant-afford-to-pay-over-100-per-month-for-health-insurance.html
Since there are 248,000,000 adult Americans in the overall U.S. population of 325, 000,000, and 50% can't afford more than $100.00 a month for insurance, we find that at least 120,000,000 Americans cannot afford "open market" insurance worthy of the name.
However, since 56% of Americans are insured through work, perhaps 53,000,000 Americans - without benefit of employer insurance - cannot afford decent health insurance.
Add to this a minimum of 10,000,000 citizens who are denied coverage for pre-existing conditions and 63,000,000 Americans - just under one in five (19.4%) - cannot secure proper coverage. (This figure is very close to the percentage of uninsured Americans - 18.3% - just before Obamacare. Last year, that percentage declined to 10.3% and, according to the trendline, the current percentage is even lower.)
According to Fox News, Trumpcare would cause 14,000,000 Americans to lose coverage by 2018 and another 10,000,000 would lose coverage by 2026. http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2017/03/13/budget-analysis-obamacare-repeal-would-result-in-millions-more-uninsured.html
In effect, Trumpcare provides de facto guarantee that the swelling ranks of uninsured Americans will be subject to "free market" death panels which, by their pay-to-play nature, means that tens of thousands of Americans will die annually for lack of health insurance.
When Harvard last probed the Free Market's de facto death panels, here's what they learned:
New Study Finds 45,000 Deaths Annually Linked To Lack Of Health Coverage
Uninsured, working-age Americans have 40 percent higher death risk than privately insured counterparts
How Do You Pay For Pre-Existing Conditions? The GOP Plans To Charge More (effectively forcing 10% of the population off insurance)
The requirement that insurance companies cover people with pre-existing conditions is a popular one. The challenge now is how do you pay for them?
“That is what a lot of the debate is around — individuals who do not have insurance who need it,” said Dan Mendelson, president of Avalere Health.
The basic model of health insurance is pretty simple: The healthy help pay for the sick. So Obamacare’s solution to paying for people with pre-existing conditions was to push more healthy people to buy insurance plans, penalize those who don’t and subsidize some who do. More healthy people paying, more sick people get covered.
Republicans do not want to do that, and their challenge is figuring out an alternative as they work on an Obamacare replacement bill.
“So imagine we're making a model airplane,” said Craig Garthwaite, who directs the Kellogg School of Management’s health care program at Northwestern University. “They want to make one with one wing and one landing gear but not think about what does it take to make this health insurance airplane get off the ground.”
The Republican alternative being considered at this point is to say sure, insurance companies still can’t deny people with pre-existing conditions, but they can charge them more.
“In theory, insurance companies might have to take these people,” said Larry Levitt with the Kaiser Family Foundation. “But you can bet they're gonna charge them astronomical premiums to keep them out of their pools.”
So the healthy would still pay for the sick. There would just be fewer sick people with insurance.
“That would have the effect of lowering premiums significantly for people who are healthy, but likely pricing people who are sick out of the market,” Levitt said.
That could be a lot of people. Twenty-seven percent of adults have pre-existing conditions that would have resulted in denial of private insurance before Obamacare.
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