Daily News Updates - Health Insurance News

Those Worst Off, Pt.2 – Mandated health insurance availability.

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This person’s income of $35,000 a year disqualified him from any state health insurance subsidies that might have otherwise been available. In surveying future health insurance prospects, let’s consider Mr. McCain’s proposal to insure people like this. Mr. McCain has announced that, if elected president, he would vastly expand government health insurance support to cover these people in high-risk pools, similar to the ones currently in Maryland. But creating a model of similar structure would not change things very much for these people from where they already are. Perhaps a stopgap, but not a solution.

These high-risk pools have been around for about thirty years now. So how’s that working out? Of the near 47 million Americans without health insurance, only less than one half of 1% (. 44% = 207,000 people), as reported by the National Association of State Comprehensive Health Insurance Plans. The cost of these plans is usually double that of the costs of normal plans in some of the states. Even these high prices don’t begin cover the expense of the treatments. The state governments often cover about 40% of these expenses and try to recover them by placing premium assessments and passing them on to other consumers.

It has been projected by health economists that transforming all the various separate existing programs into something viable at the federal level to protect these destitute would require ‘untold billions’. So far, Mr. McCain has only offered a ‘very preliminary estimate” (as the presumptive candidate puts it) of a few billion dollars. Health economists were quick to jump on the observation that this amount, though it sounds like a lot, would not come close to having any substantial effect.

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