Daily News Updates - Health Insurance News

Florida’s 3rd Report Card…Coming Up Short, Pt.1 – It’s been two months, now.

The recent hoopla concerning health insurance called “Cover Florida” is being graded by Harry Wessel of the Orlando Sentinel. He has posted a summary article on the ‘Sentinel’s website, expounding results so far. When introduced two months ago by Governor Charlie Crist, the “Cover Florida” bill easily breezed through the Florida legislature. (To track the history of this initiative, please reference articles “FL Gov. Crist Approves Badly Needed Health Insurance” and “Florida Not There Yet”.) The hope was to provide an affordable “health Insurance substitute” with premiums starting as low as $150 per month.

So, now, the effectiveness of the ‘bare bones approach’ to health insurance is finally being assessed, using recent research. The criteria are based on metrics such as affordability, adequacy of coverage of the greater needs and reducing the large numbers of those currently uninsured (about 3.7 million). As cited by the “Sentinel”, a nonprofit Washington, D.C. policy-research group called the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities informs us of the “Cover Florida” health insurance initiative’s unlikelihood of effectiveness.

The states of both Georgia and Florida were analyzed in this study and, it was found that, neither of those states had any provision for subsidizing the low-income uninsured residents segments with aid to pay for health insurance. So the goal to lower the high numbers of residents without health insurance has come up “lacking” for both states, according the report.

In the case of Georgia, they implemented a tax-break for persons who would accept risky high-deductible plans. But, in Florida’s case, the tactic was to allow health insurance companies to offer scaled-down, ‘bare-bones’ policies at low cost. The method they used to do this was to rewrite their consumer-protective mandates to a lower standard with more restrictive benefits.

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