[The company will] stop selling new health insurance to small groups in Colorado and move companies that have existing clients off the plan in the next year, affecting 1,200 companies with 5,200 employees and their dependents.
Aetna says it has to do this because they
…feel they can no longer meet the needs of our customers while remaining competitive.”
State insurance officials said they
… think the 1,200 companies affected by Aetna’s decision to leave the small group market will be able to purchase insurance from other insurers.
Note the careful wording … you’re being “moved off the plan” (dumped). State officials think you’ll be OK … they offer no data, no guesses, no remedy. They just think you’ll be OK.
Tough luck, buddy.
Aetna is leaving because of Obamacare, not that they were doing us any great favors anyway. Good riddance. Bur welcome to health care reform. It’s a game, and the insurance companies won.
People who need health insurance most are the ones that insurance companies don’t want to insure. This is known as “adverse selection.” Insurance companies have devised a myriad of ways to avoid sick people, but sick people are clever too, always looking for loopholes and back doors.
In the U.S., people looking for back doors are considered a problem, or “moral hazard,” while insurance companies avoiding sick people is normal and acceptable behavior. We’re a little perverse in the morality department.
One back door is fake (or part-time) employment with companies for the sole purpose of getting on the health plan. While it may appear that these phantom employees are being insured by the employer, they are reimbursing him under the table. In this manner, they escape the private placement market, where insurers refuse to offer coverage.
In the past, the insurer response has been to make insurance so expensive that small businesses with low wage employees cannot afford it. Those that can afford small market coverage tend to be high skill professionals, but the corner grocery store … no way. So insurance companies avoided undesirables by making themselves unaffordable.
Health care “reform” now offers credits to small businesses of less than 25 employees whose average wage is less than $50,000. Seems like a fix, right?
Wrong. What it really means is that the back door is opened a little wider now, and unprofitable clients are going to have an easier time getting through the barriers to coverage. Insurers still don’t want to cover them, and can either raise premiums to the point where credits are negated, or jump ship.
Run away! That’s all Aetna did. Smart move on their part.
The failure is not the “reforms,” and the health insurance companies are merely rational actors. The failure is the American health care model: “for-profit” companies managing health insurance is bad public policy. Obamacare did not a whit to fix this, and our problems will only get worse now.
And there is no hope of remedy. The health care debate is over.
Piece of Mindful 
It was over the day the U.S. Senate assigned the health care issue to its finance committee, chaired by Sen. Max Baucus. The rest is, shall we say, history.
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You know, the insurance cartel will have another 3 years to figure out how to get out of marginal underwriting. And we’re stating to see it.
What they really want to do is to dump a bunch of people off the roles, and then onto the exchanges when they open, where the government will pick up the cost differentials, and guarantee them their profits without them having to work for it.
I predict that the rates of the uninsured are going to skyrocket between now and 2014, and that the money set aside for subsidies will be insufficient to meet the demand (the demand for insurer profits, that is). And a lot more people will remain uninsured than the goal was.
In fact the plan may only be able to cover those that have been jettisoned off of their current plans, and a few more. Unless congress appropriates a bunch more money, or cuts benefits. More money seems implausible, so benefit cuts will be necessary at the outset. Much like the current high risk pools ended up costing twice what they initially were billed as costing during the legislative debates.
There’s a good chance that Obamacare will unravel this country’s system of insurance quicker than the government can prop up insurance company profits. Then it’s either going to be a feeding frenzy for subsidy dollars with an increasing base of uninsured, or the government will consider a true national insurance policy. I know where my bets lie…
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The Law of Economics strikes again.
You want a free lunch – but that just means that you don’t want to pay for your lunch, but want to shove that bill onto someone else who did not have your lunch.
With no surprise, people will leave.
And, as usual, you do not understand the concept of insurance. You still believe it is a big piggie bank that you can raid when you run out of money.
Until you understand the concepts of insurance, you will continue to create serious errors in understanding any attempt to resolve the apparent problem you believe exists.
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You don’t understand the conceptual framework for health care. There is no free lunch. But as a moral society, we should not deny health care to people. Because health care has been roped off by private companies, people who need care are denied. It’s perverse and immoral. Since thousands of people die prematurely due to the defects in this system, I might even call it “violent”, a word you reserve for paying taxes.
Your attitude is sociopathic, every man for himself. Those who get sick and cannot afford care should be left to die. I get that.
I also get that you think that uninsured people are that way voluntarily. Most who choose to be uninsured are young and are low risk, and if they have an accident, often have coverage via workers comp, and so are very low risk. So they choose to go bare. It’s actually a low-risk choice, market-driven, if you will.
The uninsureds that I am talking about are people like my wife, who carried insurance all of her life. Because the company I worked for dropped coverage, she was put in the private market. Because she had melanoma, no one would cover her. Is she a freeloader?
Get real, BF – one, your attitude is sociopathic, and two, you don’t seem to grasp the nature of the problem. It rubs me. You know? Ask JC above if he is a “free lunch” guy. He is not. He is simply shut out of the market through no fault of his own.
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Mark
I disagree. I understand it perfectly.
It is an economic good – just like any other economic good. It has value and it has a price.
You wish to distort economics so that you can have something you believe is very valuable at a price that is very cheap.
As such, no matter what pogram, violence, force, coercion, bribe, or propaganda – your design will cause untold economic havoc.
We do not deny anything to such people.
If they pay for it, they get it – regardless of class, age, sex, status, creed, religion, etc.
You distort the issue to believe there are people working against you – but there is not. They are people who have a valuable service – so valuable you want to steal it from them.
Then – bizarrely – you complain about their resistance.
No, they are not.
They are asked to pay for it.
It is perverse mind-twist to believe I am denying you my apples because you do not have money to buy them from me. Your inability to pay does not give you right to steal my apples.
Likewise with health care.
It is immoral to steal. You want to make such theft moral, and such resistance to theft immoral.
Such a design for society will destroy society.
This your characteristic, not mine.
You wish to steal from someone their value for YOUR use without proper payment. That is sociopathic – for you care nothing of the havoc you wreck upon society.
She paid for her coverage. It elapsed. She does not get the benefit of new apples to eat without payment just because she ate apples yesterday.
And it is not his fault either that he doesn’t have enough money to buy apples either. But it does not justify his stealing them, either
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Oh, you know, screw you and your apples. They grow out of the ground. The idea that you own them is an artificial construct. Health care merely means that we care for one another when sick. Economics, pay for service, is part of it, but it cannot be boiled down to that, as grievous illness can befall anyone.
So we construct an insurance pool defined as “us” and define an enrollment period as “all the time.” Some get more out than they pay in, some less. Who cares besides you and the Randian sociopaths?
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Mark
I own them because I cultivated them, watered them and picked them.
You didn’t do dick squat for them.
Thus, you must pay for them.
We do not “care” for strangers at the cost of care for ourselves and our own families. Such a thing would be irrational and destructive to society.
Only after our own personal responsibilities are assured can someone care for the irresponsible who cannot care for themselves.
And you will die someday, so should I pay for that too?
You will get sick and you will die. If you wish to avoid or delay, it is up to you to earn that because you are the only one who benefits from it.
I do not benefit from your health – so do not ask me to pay for it.
Then “you” go do that and leave me out of it.
You will attract the sick, and the healthy will avoid you like the plague.
You will go bankrupt in a month, for you will pay for everyone’s illness while charging nothing to them.
But that’s the rub. You will – by the point of the gun – steal my money to pay for your insanity.
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Mark,
And – as usual – you are totally void of any economic understanding.
Thus, your plan will completely fail economically.
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I knew the apple thing was coming. It only means the metaphor failed. Set it aside.
My model succeeds in 38 other countries because we are not economic beings. That’s your Randian construct. We are collaborative and mutually supportive beings with maybe 4% with no social conscience. That’s all.
Your model fails here, the only place it is tried. Yet you learn nothing by that. It means that you are insane. You continue to apply the same model, each time failing.
Choose your team.
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Banned,
The metaphor does not exist.
An apple is an economic good no different from health care.
This is probably the root of most failure of understanding of the economic destruction of socialist planning – the belief that there exists “special” economic goods that transcend the Laws of Economics.
As I said above, you want to take something you value and -by force- only pay very little for it.
There is no escaping this fact. Such a process leads only one-way; economic destruction.
It does not succeed anywhere.
I would say every nation has committed some sort of economic destruction – some worse than others, and of your 38, the damage may be glossed over by printing of currency, gaining of debt, or larger and larger seizure of the economic output.
But none have produced a method that is sustainable. None.
Where is that, pray tell?
The US has had socialist healthcare in some form or another for 60 years. It has failed – and in response, you want to make that failure go quicker and deeper.
The learning is lost on you.
Trying to force a low price for a highly valued economic good is unsustainable.
You will have as a consequence a :
withdrawal of that good (the point of this post);
an ever increasing demand for even greater subsidy
an increasing demand of ‘customers’ seeking the decreasing supply
Already chosen.
It’s called:
Freedom
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As a man told me years ago when I worked for a loony tune, “you can’t deal with crazy.” You have elected to view the world through the eyes of a Randian economist. It’s not only wrong, but the fact that you are continually forced to reconstruct reality to fit your perceptions, and that your perceptions are never affected by reality, means you are insane.
Enuf.
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Mark,
I know of no such economic theory of “Rand”. Sorry, can’t help you there.
However, I do know your economic understanding and theory will be economically disastrous.
You have NO economic theory that demonstrates the sustainability of pricing valuable goods artificially (which means, by force) low.
You are this man:
who believes his ‘flying’ costume will save him leaping off the Eiffel Tower.
You will note the 12in hole in the ground that his body made.
You will have to answer these questions:
(1) If forcing an artificial low price for “this” economic good that you claim is so valuable that it must be made cheap works, do you support such an idea for all economic goods? If not, why some and not others?
(2) Do you believe low value goods should be made more expensive to offset the artificial lowering of very valuable goods price?
(3) Do you believe that all goods prices should be set by a committee to ensure “fairness”?
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Stupid economics will land you the same way it did Franz.
But here is the vital difference.
Whereas he tested his ignorance of the Laws of Nature on himself, and paid the price with his own life….
…you wish to test your ignorance of the Laws of Economics on your children and their children and have them pay the price.
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