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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bread Upon The Water who wrote (236461)	11/1/2013 5:42:58 PM
From: neolib	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 542060

I feel needs to be addressed in order for the AFCA, and Democratic control of the Senate, to survive politically. My opinion as well. I also of course agree that the existing system has the other problems you mention, and I do applaud Obama for trying, but he has bungled it rather badly. I don't think there is a simple fix to the problem of keeping one's existing insurance. The insurance co. were handed a golden opportunity to terminate all their low cost policies and replace them with ones that are 2x as expensive. Given that they can only keep 20% in either case, the results are obvious. But I don't think it would be easy to tweak the law such that they must now start offering the same policies again. They offered those policies before because the incremental income was helpful, and if the competition was going to offer them, so must they, not because they liked those policies. Now the ACA has basically given them all a gentleman's agreement to ditch the low cost plans, and hence make effectively 40% of those people rather than 20%, and the gov will issue fines to their customers if they don't sign up. The math is a no-brainer for their CEOs. At a minimum they need to sit back, relax and see how many people they lose. If the populace sucks up and pays, why worry? It is important to keep in mind that the individuals being screwed were all ones who on their own, thought catastrophic insurance was worth having, so it will take some significant pressure for them to instead fork over 10% of income as a fine and have no insurance. The odds are, they get most of them back, they will just be pissed off people. But so what, from the insurance co view point the clients are now stuck, thanks to the ACA placing them in the correct position....