Daily News Updates - Health Insurance News

Mr. McCain’s Definition of ‘Best Coverage’, Pt.7 – Shift to individual plans, but help for the destitute.

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Not by coincident, the tax shift will also have the effect of shifting people away from employer-based health insurance over to individual private plans. The scope of this effect is only left open to much speculation at this time. It is anticipated to provide a windfall to the private health insurance industry. They will be able to ‘cherry-pick’ the least risky, one by one, then isolate the undesirable risks of the older and the less-healthy. The latter can either be denied health insurance or shuffled into high-risk pools for significantly higher premiums. The predominant risk-sharing pools of today’s employer-based health insurance plans that average out premium costs may go away or, at least, be greatly diminished.

It’s good to see that Mr. McCain is attending to the poor and chronically ‘un-insurable’. Surveys of the 45.7 million victims with no health insurance indicate that, two-thirds of them have incomes below the 200% federal poverty line and one-third are reported to be chronic cases. These segment sets, no doubt, intersect somewhat. Some of the chronic, undoubtedly fall under the 200% poverty-level and must not be counted twice, while there are undoubtedly others with no health insurance who are healthy and not financially strapped.

But there are definitely millions among them who are unable to obtain health insurance for one reason or another. The troubling quandary tends to be the extent of Mr. McCain’s commitment and the means he has derived to bring this about. His ‘very preliminary’ estimate was to provide $10 billion for this purpose. Nearly all the experts agree that the means to cover all these people is more close to $120 billion. We’re all anxious to receive greater detail on the mechanics of Mr. McCain’s plan.

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