Daily News Updates - Health Insurance News

The Real Problem of Covering the ‘Uninsured’, Pt.6 – Destabilizing health care weather patterns.

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2) With so much attention on “the other guy’s” proposals, the vagueness of this guy’s proposal leaves us only with vague presumptions of his own. One of these ‘presumptions’ is the required standard in order to receive these tax credits. What are they, anyway?

3) In the event that employers stop offering employer-based health insurance, what will the employees do? Will they rush over, en-mass, to the private individual health insurance world as Mr. McCain hopes. Or will they try to seek out more innovative risk-sharing alternatives such as community-level group plans, in order to avoid ‘gouging’? No matter which route they take, there will be large diversity in the costs and benefits among plans based on the health insurance providers ‘risk assessment’ over things like a person’s age or their health history. The effect of this ‘inequity’ would result in the uniform tax credit awarding the young and healthy worker virtually ‘free’ health insurance, the 60-year old work only a ‘drop in the bucket’ and the ‘chronic’ worker ‘disqualification’ due to unaffordability.

4) Another anticipated effect is the extent of the workers who will simply pocket the extra wages awarded from their employers who have saved by dropping employer-based health insurance. These people will elect to gamble on health costs by ‘going bare’ with no health insurance and hope they don’t get sick or, at least, be able to afford the consequence. When they can’t afford medical costs, of course they will have to rely on the governments sponsored ‘safety nets’ for the uninsured, which almost always prove to be much more expensive to ‘someone’.

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