'Thanks to the Affordable Care Act, this woman is saving about $6,350 this year on premiums, which coincidentally is the most an insurance company can require an individual beneficiary to pay annually in out-of-pocket expenses. In other words, the worst-case financial outcome for her is a total wash. Almost to the dollar. But that doesn’t account for everything else the law has put in place to protect her from past insurance company practices, which will ultimately redound both to her personal and financial health. Her carrier can no longer rescind her plan under any circumstances. It can’t invoke a lifetime cap on outlays, which would easily leave a leukemia patient effectively uninsured. And it can’t hike her premiums on the basis of her health status, because that kind of discrimination is now illegal.
Now take the Affordable Care Act away. All of those stabilizing mechanisms disappear. But that doesn’t mean we go backward in time to the pre-Obamacare status quo. The vanquished individual health insurance market of 2013 doesn’t just restore itself as if Obamacare never happened. There’s no guarantee that our hypothetical patient’s old healthcare plan will be available to her anymore. She’d probably have to be underwritten all over again. And given all the uncertainty in the market, it stands to reason that any carrier willing to insure a 49-year-old cancer patient will set premiums higher than they were a year ago, perhaps at an unaffordable level, or raise them substantially at some point in the near future.'
The right’s sociopathic new scam: Using Americans to harm their own health plans
GOP-aligned groups are now exploiting innocent people who need Obamacare — by having them campaign for its demise
Okayyyyy, can the Republicans do something else, and make laws? Damn, the only thing they are obsessed with is Obamacare! How fixing the things that don't work in it instead I f fooling the people, and talking about repealing the damn thing! The law is here to stay, so focus on making laws, the least productive group ever!
… because they're part of the insurance industry's lobbying targets, and the Republicans want to make Obama look bad, so it's a twofer.
Somehow you think it's okay to force an insurance company to insure someone that already has cancer? It's a private company in what used to be a semi-free country. They're being forced to cover people, and the rest of us are forced to pay for it. Another a case of the working class being screwed while being told how great it is. Reminds me of the Ponzi scheme known as Social Security.
+Chris Gilliam Actually, I agree that operating via private insurance companies (often based on employer) is a highly problematic way of providing affordable health care. That's why I'd rather see a government funded single-payer solution.
That said, I'd rather see a victim of cancer not be cut off from the only thing that's keep her from dying and her family from financial ruin. I think that's precisely the sort of thing that "the rest of us" ought to be paying for (esp. since any of the "rest of us" could be caught up in the same tragedy).
+Dave Hill well said!