The Wall Street Journal points out the truth about health insurance and what ObamaCare will do to it. The short answer is that this is going to cost you and I a lot more than the schemers are promising. Because the plans now being touted will introduce schemes that have been tried at the state level nationwide. Schemes that have driven insurance prices through the roof in those states.
That’s one reason that only five states-Maine, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York and Vermont-have Mr. Obama’s proposal for “guaranteed issue” on the books today. New Hampshire and Kentucky repealed such laws after finding that they soon had an even smaller individual insurance market as companies fled the state.
Another proposed reform known as “community rating” imposes uniform premiums regardless of health condition. This also blows up the individual insurance market, by making it far more expensive for young, healthy or low-risk consumers to join pools-if they join at all. And if the healthy don’t join risk pools, then premiums go up for everyone and insurers have little choice but to reduce their risk by refusing to cover those who have a high chance of getting sick, such as people with a history of cancer. This is why 35 states today impose no limits whatsoever on how much insurers can vary premiums and six states allow wide variation among consumers.
New York, New Jersey and Massachusetts have both community rating and guaranteed issue. And, no surprise, they have the three most expensive individual insurance markets among all 50 states, with premiums roughly two to three times higher than the rest of the country. In 2007, the average annual premium in New Jersey was $5,326 for singles and in New York $12,254 for a family, versus the national average of $2,613 and $5,799, respectively. ObamaCare would impose New York-type rates nationwide.
That’s some bad “reform”. Mind you, this is in addition to another trillion or more dollars it will cost in tax money to run the program. You’ll get higher insurance rates and higher taxes.
Younger people will especially get hit hard by this. They are going to get reamed with much higher premiums than should have to pay. How’s that hope and change?
The insurance companies and drug makers are largely supporting these changes. That should tell you that these “reforms” are not at all what the Democrats are claiming they are. As for those two powerful lobbies, they are focusing on the short term gain to their bottom lines of millions of new customers without considering how thoroughly these “reforms” will destroy them in the long run.
