Daily News Updates - Health Insurance News

Those Worst Off, Pt.9 – They leave the illusion of safety.

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Mr. McCain’s presumption is that these "high-risk pools would theoretically serve to fill the gaps,” again, as Mr. Sack words it in his article. To this, many studying the problem have come up with the persuasion that, thus far, the health insurance companies have gained the most benefit. Being allowed to raise health insurance premiums accordingly, their risk is further hedged and, because of the significantly higher Health insurance premium rates, their other private-plan customers are shunned from abandoning their current health insurance for something better. Very few would consider these high-risk pools better.

Georgetown University professor, Karen Pollitz once served on the board of the Maryland health insurance high-risk plan and has become an expert on high-risk pools. This is what she has to say about these health insurance plans: “They are run in ways that protect the profitability of commercial insurers.” “They leave the illusion that there’s a safety net without there really being much of one.” So, thus far, it looks like the ‘worst off’ will be even worse off.

As far as any federal funding for these people, Mr. McCain admitted that there would be ‘some’ federal funding. His ‘very preliminary figure was 7 billion to $10 billion. Douglas Holtz-Eakin is Mr. McCain’s chief domestic policy adviser. One of his former credentials was that he was the director of the Congressional Budget Office. Mr. Holtz-Eakin explains the this funding figure was earmarked to assist between 5- to 7 million people obtain health insurance coverage. Of course, the process would be very selective.

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