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Thursday, February 23rd, 2017

GOP Leaders Urge Return To ‘High-Risk Insurance Pools’ That Critics Call Costly

Author:     Mark Zdechlik
Source:     npr
Publication Date:     February 18, 20176:43 AM ET
Link: GOP Leaders Urge Return To ‘High-Risk Insurance Pools’ That Critics Call Costly
Stephan:   The thing about Republicans is that because they have a world view based on ideology instead of facts, they make the same mistakes over and over, never learning from past failures. Here is a glaring example of what I mean. Unless there is massive citizen push back such as is now gathering, applied consistently and always growing, this could well be our future. It is not something you want to have come to pass. We need universal healthcare just like every other developed nation in the world. We need to reduce the share of GDP that we spend as a people on health care to around 7-8% instead of our present 17.6%. If we could just rise to Norway's level, 11th, and their expenditure 7.6%, we would save one trillion dollars a year. A trillion dollars annually would be available and it would pay for college, prenatal care, early childhood care, and elder support. No taxes required.

Craig Britton once paid $18,000 a year in premiums for health insurance he bought through Minnesota’s “high risk pool.” He calls the argument that these pools can bring down the cost of monthly premiums “a lot of baloney.”
Credit: Mark Zdehchlik / MPR News

Some Republicans looking to scrap the Affordable Care Act say monthly health insurance premiums need to be lower for the individuals who have to buy insurance on their own. One way to do that, GOP leaders say, would be to return to the use of what are called high-risk insurance pools.

But critics say even some of the most successful high-risk pools that operated before the advent of Obamacare were very expensive for patients enrolled in the plans, and for the people who subsidized them — which included state taxpayers and people with employer-based health insurance.

The argument in favor of high-risk pools goes like this: Separate the healthy people, who don’t cost very much to insure, from people who have pre-existing medical conditions, such as a past […]

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