Daily News Updates - Health Insurance News

Those Worst Off, Pt.7 – Major migration from shared risk.

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Back to Mr. McCain and his health insurance plan. What he calls his ‘Guaranteed Access Plan’ is actually a restructure of the ‘market-driven’ approach. Some say it’s more similar to the health insurance system we already have than the proposed ‘universal coverage’ that Mr. Obama promotes. In many ways it is, but in other ways it’s very different. As complex as the current mess our health insurance/care system, we must choose what elements to keep and what elements to lose. To that end, we should study the effects of the various health insurance system elements in combinations and then project results we would expect to find, based on the most likely cumulative effect.

Mr. McCain’s goal is to create a health insurance marketplace that is more competitive and still equitable. Most all of the employer incentives, that of employer-based health insurance tax exclusions would disappear.

Of course this would be more equitable to the 17 million counterparts of employer-based health insurance, that is, those who have private health insurance plans.

One of the new elements that Mr. McCain favors is to award a $2,500 tax credit to those individuals earning more than, about, $25,000 per year ($5,000 to households earning more than $50,000 per year). It is expected that this will cause a quick demise to the shared-risk pools and, with about 60% of our nation’s insured relying on the stability of employ-based health insurance, we might well expect to see that go away. Mr. McCain’s hope is to drive everyone over to private health insurance plans.

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