Daily News Updates - Health Insurance News

Focusing On the Big Picture, Pt.3 – High-risk pool – risky business.

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Another tenet of Mr. McCain’s plan is to promote the state-level high-risk health insurance pools in order to cover the people who have pre-exiting and chronic health conditions. Right now, these people have great difficulty getting affordable and adequate health insurance coverage from the private individual plans that Mr. McCain is shifting everyone over to. Typically they are either flat-out denied or else they are offered plans that limit or exclude the very conditions for which they need the health insurance in the first place.

So far, these high risk plans haven’t faired very well. One typical example is the State of Florida. Because high-risk plans have to rely so heavily on funding, they can only enroll new people who are able to pay much higher premium rates than normal plans (as much as $10,000 per month). The few ‘lucky’ ones who are funded are almost non-existent. Right now, Florida has about 3.8 million people with no health insurance. For lack of funding, Florida’s state pool program hasn’t accepted any new enrollees for the last 17-years and still doesn’t. Today, there are only 313 enrollees left in their program. So, of the3.8 million people with no health insurance, only about 0.0082% of the uninsured population is being served in Florida. For an in-depth understanding of these high-risk pools, please refer to the article series entitled “Those Worst Off”.

Mr. McCain does plan to offer some funding to help this situation. However, the details are too vague to make any assessment about. He has provided, what he referred to as “very preliminary estimates”. His mention of $10 billion was given, but specifics were not given as to who or how many would obtain this health insurance.

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