Daily News Updates - Health Insurance News

Those Worst Off, Pt.8 – How are they addressed by Mr. McCain?

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By giving up employer-based health insurance plans, the risk-sharing pools that enable higher-risk individuals at affordable rates may go away. With private health insurance plans, typically, those who are not both young and healthy will “face higher costs because their risks are not spread across broad groups of workers,” as Mr. Sack words it in his article. With the employee group plans, health insurance companies aren’t allowed to assign higher rates to the less-healthy, as they do with private plans.

Another element, unique to Mr. McCain’s plan is to allow health insurance companies to sell across state lines. It is expected that this move would effectively deregulate health insurance in order to increase open-market competition, thereby lowering the cost of health insurance premiums.

The concern here is that, while it could serve to make health insurance cheaper, it could also add greater risk to the holders. There are already problems with this where 25 million Americans are caught with inadequate insurance. Many of these have been found to be in worse shape than those people who have no coverage.

Getting back to the topic of ‘the worst off’, it is generally agreed by all that the McCain privatization plan would leave this segment in even worse shape than they are now, because of the lack of the ‘risk-sharing’ pools. So, to address this, the McCain camp is promoting these high-risk pools that were addressed in the first few articles of this series. Since the purpose of this article is to focus on this worst-off segment, we will consider how some of the proposed elements will affect this group.

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