Playing off the gaming suggestions made in this post, I'm wondering why the following won't happen:
- Some companies who currently provide health insurance dump their employees into public pool to save money
- Some of these newly uninsured individuals decide to not get insurance through the pool and pay the fine instead. There's no penalty and only reward since the fine is less than the premiums will be and no insurance company can turn you down when you finally need insurance.
- Insurance companies begin to lose customers, but only those who don't need health care. Without the premiums paid by people who don't make use of health care, their profits turn to losses.
- To make up for the lost premiums, the insurance companies raise their rates.
- The raised rates turn existing insurance plans into "Cadillac" plans.
- The companies who did not dump their employees now have to pay extra surcharges on their newly discovered "Cadillac" plans.
- Return to step 1.
6 comments:
This is not a bug, but a feature, because it pushes more and more people into the "public option", in this case fed subsidized insurance, which just gives congress more opportunity to regulate until insurance companies are the competitive, private, and free market juggernauts that Amtrak is.
Step 4 won't be allowed to happen. Instead the insurance companies will refuse to take any new customers, government will demonize them, and insist that the government must step in and Do Something!
You know that won't end well for the rest of us.
(permurte)
Jeff, I've worked with some congressional staffers in the past. The majority of them should have been out hoeing weeds instead of making public policy. They were vapid climbers with no practical experience. A few of them were gems. I can't tell if this particular sequence had been gamed out in advance and was a feature like you said or if it was simply an outcome of the bill's authors being of below-average intellect and experience.
Anon, I don't know if the insurers will be allowed to shut down the new customer window. That would seem to violate the preexisting condition part of the bill. Even if they can turn off new customers, they will still be screwed as they will lose a number of their current, healthy customers who pay the premiums, but don't need the services.
The key feature of doing away with preexisting conditions rules is that it wipes out the revenue-generating portion of the insurers customer base.
"Not a bug, but a feature" is a software engineering inside joke. Like making lemons out of lemonade. I agree that they probably weren't smart enough at the bill writing level, but at the strategic level, I'm sure they saw any sand in the gears of free enterprise health care as just another brick in the road to their single payer sugar shack (to mix a whole bunch of metaphors).
"The majority of them should have been out hoeing weeds instead of making public policy."
Hey, now, don't go disparaging the intelligence needed to hoe weeds. You've got to tell all those fiddly little sprouting plants apart.
And don't even get me started on the level of skill needed to dig a proper ditch without having it collapse on you . . .
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