Daily News Updates - Health Insurance News

McCain's High-Risk Health Insurance Pools, Pt.1 -- Can they work?

Laura Meckler and Anna Wilde Mathews of the Wall Street Journal have written a very informative article assessing John McCain’s latest health insurance proposal. His proposals before this point have been widely criticized for being presumptuous on issues dealing with sick people and pre-existing conditions like diabetes, MS and cancer. As the article states, health insurance based on consumer accessibility can make it impossible for those with a “history of illness” to get any private coverage because it is not based a group risk pool. So McCain is now responding with a proposal to “bolster the role of high-risk pools” in health insurance for this group of people.

It is notable, however, that the burden requires “significant government subsidies” for these being placed on the individual states, themselves. These types of premiums are known to be expensive and place high restrictions on what’s covered and who may enroll. At this point, only about 200 thousand people are using them, while 47 million of our citizens are completely without health insurance. Assistant vice president at the Commonwealth Fund, Sara Collins, comments, "They tend not to work particularly well”. She explains that the states currently providing these subsidized risk-pool health plans are financially strapped and cannot fund them adequately. Contrasting this Republican proposal with that of both Democratic candidates, the Democrats propose to require health insurance providers to “cover the sick and healthy alike”. Instead of putting all the focus on government-subsided risk pools, they plan to bolster the non-subsidized risk pools of employee-based health insurance that most people are already using. They would require those employers to either cover them or else contribute to a fund for that purpose.

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