Friar Bijou wrote:
The fact that the insurance companies raised their prices is purely a matter of "more money!!" not "OMG we're gonna go broke".
Except that "more money" is normally limited by the willingness of the customer to pay more for the same product (that darned free market thing). Surely you can see how when the government mandates that customers must buy the product, and have few options about what level and type of product they can buy, that this creates a scenario where the costs will rise. You can see that, right?
That's in addition to the cost increases incurred by covering PEC. The entire issue with that is the assumption that the person in question has not paid into the insurance industry in the past, yet will now cost the industry more money than they can charge to cover it. Insurance, as mentioned earlier, is about risk. But in this case, it's not. The insurance company knows it will lose money over time by covering that person. Period. Zero question. It's not a matter of 10,000 people buying health insurance and some percentage of them will contract an expensive illness, but we don't know which ones. This is a case where someone comes up to us, having never paid into the insurance pool at all, already has an expensive illness, and wants us to cover him for the same cost.
The only way insurance companies can do that is to jack up the rates for everyone else.
Quote:
Frankly, I think we should go completely single payer and let the health isurance companies go the way of the buggy harness industry.
Uh huh. Which is precisely the conclusion that the ACA was created to try to make you come to. If they can break the health care system in the US so badly, that even in a nation which by nature opposes socialized systems, the people will demand it in this case. That's by design. The ACA was never intended to be a functional health care system. It was always intended to be broken so badly that it would drive people to socialized medicine.