Health-insurance cheaters
Charlie Baker at Harvard Pilgrim writes people have figured out how to game the state's mandatory insurance system: Buy insurance for a few months, run up massive bills, then cancel insurance and pay the relatively low penalties for going without:
... Between April of 2008 and March of 2009, about 40% of the people who purchased individual insurance from Harvard Pilgrim stayed covered by us for less than 5 months. Even more amazing, they incurred, on average, about $2,400 per person in monthly medical expenses - roughly 600% higher than what we would have expected. It wouldn't surprise me if other health plans have the same problem. ...
His proposed answer: Let insurers reinstate the waiting periods and pre-existing exclusions for new subscribers that was eliminated with the health-care reform law. He doesn't say what people who have pre-existing conditions would do, but presumably they'd still go to hospitals, which would then have to eat the cost or pass it along to insurers - just like in the days before mandated insurance.
Comments
Welcome to "universal"
Welcome to "universal" coverage. In their universe, honest people pay.
Honest People Pay?
You mean sick people get screwed because they aren't a sufficient profit center.
Either that, or people who have not been insured end up with doctors testing them for everything once they do have insurance.
I suspect that what is REALLY happening is that Baker's own people are letting certain clients know when they qualify for the state plan and helping them apply, and they switch when approved. That really isn't a problem for him, but it is consevatude talking points! By Gum! They get expensive medical care until they get on the state plan, instead of just DYING! NO FAIR! The insurance plan has to pay for several months! In other words, he's lying about the situation and wants to leverage it to get the "sick and poor people need not apply" way of life back.
When Charlie Baker volunteers to remove his own very expensive to ensure son from the rolls and pay for his care out of pocket, I'll buy his bs.
Fucking great
I can't believe I didn't think of this myself. The insurers and Beacon Hill wanted to stick it up our asses, now they're getting fucked back twice as hard.
Note to big healthcare and the Beacon Hill whores: We didn't make it in Boston because we're stupid, you know. Stop trying to outsmart intelligent people.
Are you sure that the
Are you sure that the insurers aren't still winning?
Perhaps not
They're not crying foul for nothing.
My point is that they might
My point is that they might still be winning overall with the current insurance situation, and that they simply want to win *more*.
I suspect that the only losers are those citizens who are subsidizing a combination of freeloading citizens and the profit-taking of insurance companies.
A single-payer plan would solve this problem easily
by creating a single 'merged pool' of everyone living in the state. Of course it would also abolish Baker's company along with all of the other useless and parasitic insurance companies.
Agreed
We spend a gawd-awful amount of money on 'administering' health insurance.
Just think if that energy were redirected from the bureaucratic paper shuffling and trickery... to actually improving health care or otherwise more directly contributing to human betterment.
Co-pays might help keep abuse in check. Unhealthy activities such as smoking and Cinnabon could be taxed at point of sale. :)
Communist!
How the hell do you expect people like United Health Group's CEO, William W McGuire, to earn $125 million per year with this kind of nutty, left-wing thinking?
Bet yer one of them Obamby-pamby socialist left-wingnuts.
The taxes alone (30%) on that income are enough to feed a family of four for something like 1,400 years at $100/week. How do you expect the poor to get by if the rich don't stay rich?
duh!
http://blogs.webmd.com/mad-about-medicine/2007/08/ceo-compensation-who-said-healthcare-is.html
A problem but probably not the solution
Well, if anyone was going to find a problem with our universal health-care program, and insurer is probably first on the list.
He's isolated a problem, however, I don't think he's even skimmed the surface of possible solutions.
Revamping the state's program is needed in order to keep it affordable to the people while not over-burdening the state.
No one wants to get start working on it because they fear it will all fall apart and/or that everyone who has a stake (insurers, hospitals, the state) will jump on it and start tearing it into pieces in order to get what they want.
Those in the State House who put together the original plan did a great thing. We have 'almost' universal health-care (98%?).
Making it work for everyone is the next step.
Throwing people with pre-existing conditions back into "the system" doesn't seem like a wise idea at all. It's cruel, and it almost seems criminal, in fact. All it will mean is less quality health care for the people who need it most.
(And, how does Charlie Baker know what these people did after they were part of Harvard Pilgrim? And how does he know if they went to the state's plan or left the state or died, or what?)
Why does insurance cost so much here?
in California I can buy in about an hour, from several vendors on a web page, real health insurance with pretty good coverage for under $200 a month. That same coverage in Massachusetts is around $400 last time I checked, takes approximately forever to research, and can go into the thousands.... the state-subsidized plans are routinely CHALLENGED by the "authorities" working in some flourescent-lit office in Revere, and take, I'm told, two to four months to be approved, when they are approved at all.
WTF is that all about? Same guy, same needs, same kind of doctors making about the same amount of money, comparable utilities, food, and rent expenses, lower fuel costs, exactly equal telecom and roughly equal admin staffing costs and overhead.
I simply do not get it. Is this just the lingering legacy of that old, asinine "the legislature knows better and will set the rates" crap that went on until not very long ago?
Per previous discussions, please provide your reply in UTF-8 well-formed XML.
Because they want me to
Because they want me to subsidize all the poor people. I've been paying close to $400/mo. for HMO with large deductible, for one healthy person, and it only makes financial sense as an overpriced (price-fixed) catastrophic safety net.
Well, I now qualify as poor-people myself, thanks to other bureaucratic nightmares, so I'm going to have to start drawing on the surplus I've paid into the system. What? It doesn't work that way? Too many poor people, and insurance services have been extracting profit besides? :)
Or not
That's what they want you to think. Problem is, nobody, or almost nobody, gets that teaser rate. If you have ever been to the doctor for anything, it suddenly becomes a much higher price ... or they simply refuse to insure you at all because you had allergies in kindergarten or broke your arm in 5th grade.
At least in MA, they have to insure you at what the state says is a fair rate, and they can't give you outrageous price quotes or kick you off or decide that you don't qualify if you have asthma or suddenly need an appendectomy. California insurers have been doing those things, and have been getting sued over dropping people for "not mentioning a preexisting condition" when they get really sick - preexisting condition meaning "didn't mention that they had a flu shot" or similar such bosh. Their insurance companies pay their people huge bonuses to make that stuff up and not cover cancer treatment, etc.