Daily News Updates - Health Insurance News

McCain's High-Risk Health Insurance Pools, Pt.3 -- Can they work?

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In order to fix this problem, McCain is proposing a new high-risk pool health insurance schema to aid those who will be denied on their own. He calls it the “Guaranteed Access Plan”. He assures us that health insurance premium costs will be “reasonable”, offering subsidies to help enrollees of low-income status. As to how this will be accomplished, we’ve been given little further detail. His summing statement from his health insurance rollout last April was "We need to make sure they get the high-quality coverage they need." Mr. McCain is known for his derision to “government-run health care” but now we have a situation where these high-risk pools will require much “government intervention”. Douglas Holtz-Eakin, McCain’s chief policy adviser addresses by agreeing with this, but points out that the Democrats’ plans require even more.

For the last several years, premiums for these high-risk plans cost measurably more than normal plans. Figures from 2006 show that the average medical costs these plans funded was 61%. Most of the rest was funded by way of state governments. The amount not covered by the high-risk health insurance plans came to about $3,800 per person for a total of about $722 million. Mr. Holtz-Eakin offered what he called "extremely preliminary" projections of the federal government’s cost for these subsidies. Federal high-risk pool subsidy costs were projected to be between $7 billion to $10 billion. Experts are troubled by this. They don’t believe these figures come anywhere close to the need. There will be just way too many people in this group who will be cast out into the open health insurance market, when employers drop out.

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