Friday, January 8, 2010

Campaign Promises

Besides Transparency Obama promised many other things. Universal Health Care was another, matter of fact he has labeled it the crown jewel of his agenda.

Recalling the campaign I distinctly remember a give and take exchange where Obama was getting push back from the left, saying the poor didn't want to pay for something they were already getting free. Obama swerved around the issue by saying, if they didn't want the government plan, they could continue as before and be exempted by the mandate. The position was later changed to heavily subsidize the poor for the cost of a plan.

The 18-30 age group, Obama was heavily courting during the election, then squawked they didn't want any coverage either, being in the peak of health, insurance was considered a waste of money by them. Universal Health now had another new entitlement class. A special class that didn't have to pay unless they were in an ambulance on the way to a hospital. (How Constitutionally fair, no age discrimination here).

Now that the public option is "dead", the onus falls on private health to succeed in this governmental business model.

Okay, you're the actuary for XYZ Health Insurance . You have a group of people that will only want your insurance at an immediate time when they are 100% guaranteed to make a claim. To make matters worse, such claimants have yet to pay your company a penny, towards their instant policy. Adding insult to injury, this is a group who likely will skip on the premium when the first payment is due, or stop paying once the smoke has cleared from their medical emergency.

No way you say, surely these unfortunates who do receive instant insurance, would be so eternally grateful, their future premiums would be paid weeks in advance of the due date. Doubtful. Many of these so called 18-30 year old adults, won't even pay for their own kids school lunches.

So as that actuary what are you going to do for this pretty much deadbeat group? I expect the same as you've done in the past, throw it all back into the pot to be paid by those who do pay.

The difference now is there will be more freeloaders, because the government legislatively encourages it. Add in the illegals. Raid Medicare by $500 billion, in which direction are insurance costs going ? This is an automatic, private health insurance premiums are going up and up and up.

Put money down and take odds, that the final conferenced version will contain a public option trigger.

This is a)Cloward and Piven, b) the purest form of unconstitutional stupidity, or c) all of the above.

Steve

No comments:

Post a Comment

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.