Unintended Consequences of Obama Halfway Healthcare!
A few weeks ago, when I saw the new change in the healthcare text on Obama's web site, I thought it was just pandering. I mean, how could he pretend to say that he would eliminate risk based pricing when that is inherent to his healthcare model. (Because it would raise prices, a LOT)
But then I realized, maybe that's his intent, because it would still be a 'fair price' as long as its profitable to insurers.
For example, in New Jersey and Seattle and probably some other places, risk based pricing is illegal. What that means is that insurance companies simply don't write many individual policies. They price it so expensively, nobody wants them. (and in Seattle, as I understand, many have left the market)
They will always get the last laugh, you see.
How stupid we are to depend on politicians like Obama who clearly don't understand basic third grade math!
I can't see how he would have gone to Harvard and all, without being able to understand something this basic. But he did! Wow! Gee whiz.
Hmm. Something is wrong. So, I guess, my wonder is, HOW IS HE GETTING AWAY WITH THIS? Does anybody know how? Maybe, So many of his followers are young, naive, they are healthy. Is that the point. What can we do? Maybe sick old folks who are still under 65 should be banished up into the mountains with a blanket at the first sign or weakness? Like they used to do in Japan?
Few of us have the money to pay these bills. Nobody is willing - Except poor, deranged socialistic Hillary, to force the healthcare lobby to lower its prices. We pay TWICE what other developed countries in Europe pay, we subsidize the whole world's research. What do we get in return? Bankruptcies, bitterness. CYNICISM. Not "Hope". I see why Obama is focusing on young, healthy people. Smart! But it won't work for so many of us. We JUST DON'T HAVE THE MONEY. We have been saying this all along. But, we are being dragged along to a party we can't afford, one we can't attend. Any satisfaction of having a half black man in Washington is an EXPENSIVE luxury, if we ALSO then have to give up really affordable healthcare for another decade or two! Can't we just say no?
Maybe somebody should call Obama and tell him we just want out. We want to start our own country on an island somewhere, so if politics is like a marriage and its looking like many of us are being hornswaggled ito a shotgun marriage, maybe we should get a divorce.
http://www.economist.com/research/Econom ics/alphabetic.cfm?LETTER=A
Adverse selection
When you do business with people you would be better off avoiding. This is one of two main sorts of market failure often associated with insurance. The other is moral hazard. Adverse selection can be a problem when there is asymmetric information between the seller of insurance and the buyer; in particular, insurance will often not be profitable when buyers have better information about their risk of claiming than does the seller. Ideally, insurance premiums should be set according to the risk of a randomly selected person in the insured slice of the population (55-year-old male smokers, say). In practice, this means the average risk of that group. When there is adverse selection, people who know they have a higher risk of claiming than the average of the group will buy the insurance, whereas those who have a below-average risk may decide it is too expensive to be worth buying. In this case, premiums set according to the average risk will not be sufficient to cover the claims that eventually arise, because among the people who have bought the policy more will have above-average risk than below-average risk. Putting up the premium will not solve this problem, for as the premium rises the insurance policy will become unattractive to more of the people who know they have a lower risk of claiming. One way to reduce adverse selection is to make the purchase of insurance compulsory, so that those for whom insurance priced for average risk is unattractive are not able to opt out.
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