Daily News Updates - Health Insurance News

Those Worst Off, Pt.11 – It looks like a dud.

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Even though Maryland’s high-risk health insurance plan was touted as a godsend at the onset, five years later it has outgrown itself, as the other similar plans that preceded it have experienced. Because of its high growth rate of 30% new enrollment every year for the last two, it is already facing insolvency around the corner. It is not expected to survive much beyond the year 2010. Administrators of the plan are already having to ‘slow things down’. Some of the steps it has taken are to raise health insurance premiums, further increase the co-pays and deductibles, raise up the out-of-pocket caps, lower the lifetime max’s and push out the hold times for the ‘worst off’ (those with pre-existing conditions) from a 2-month wait to a 6-month delay. There was a buy-in option for those who elected not to wait for health insurance coverage, but even the ‘buy-in cost’ has been raised.

This is definitely not a strategy to ‘close up shop’. The administrators are even trying to increase health insurance enrollment for the large demand that they perceived to be dire needs of the residents they are pledged to serve. In this noble effort, the state of Maryland plans to raise assessments to help out with hospital bills. Right now, they are already covering two-thirds of these expenses. Perhaps the best assessment of this noble squeeze toward health insurance coverage is given by the plan’s director, Mr. Popper: “It’s not easy when you see there is strong demand for something and you need to temper that demand.” Their strategy is to apply ‘economic forces’ to prevent ‘runaway’ conditions to avoid the plan’s collapse, “which is a solution that no one wants,” he adds at the end.

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