Daily News Updates - Health Insurance News

Speaking Up On McCain’s Plan, Pt.2 – How will this shift change things?

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To explain some of the above statements, let’s look closer at why. For the statement that Americans will be herded over to individual-risk based private health insurance plans we should know how this would happen. The experts agree that taking away the employers’ incentives to offer employer-based health insurance will cause employers to curtail offering it any more. A large part of the incentives are the tax exemptions for employer health insurance. These go away under McCain’s plan for the first time ever.

When employers stop offering health insurance benefits, employees will have nowhere else to turn except private individual-risk assessed plans. Employers have been in an accelerating trend for the last few years to drop benefits, as it is already. The McCain change may signal the ‘death knell’ for employer-based health insurance as we know it.

By the estimates of the Washington-based Economic Policy Institute, nearly 20 million Americans would lose employer-based health insurance. Health economist with that organization, Elise Gould , explains: “It’s a radical dismantling of what we have today in the employer-sponsored health insurance program. By eliminating tax exclusion, you’ll see a faster erosion in employer-provided coverage.”

Another down-side for many, is that the risk-sharing pool goes away. Therefore, the young and healthy will be offered better rates then they had with the employer-based risk-sharing pools. But those not young and healthy will be subject to higher rates and many will simply be denied health insurance.

So when we hear the statement that “95 percent of the American people will have increased funds to go out and buy the insurance of their choice,” if you take that to mean health insurance/care will cost me less than it did before, you have been told a lie.

But if you take it to mean, yeah, I’ll have more ready cash I can spend toward health insurance/care, which will also cost more, then you were told the truth.

Continued…
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