I agree with Peter. Appleman, you have an excellent understanding of insurance in general, but perhaps there are some details of Obamacare that you might not know about.
appleman2006 wrote:I do not disagree but it was doomed to fail because insurance was being asked to take the equivalent of too many houses that had already burned down. Most insurance companies went running for the hills.
Actually, this is precisely the lever that Republicans have been using to sabotage Obamacare since 2015. Salon explains it
thus:
When the ACA was rolled out, telling insurance companies that they had to insure anybody who signed up, regardless of previous conditions or sickness, everybody realized that the insurance companies would probably lose money in the first decade or so, until previously-uninsured-but-sick people got into the system, got better, and things evened out.
To get the insurance companies to go along with this danger of losing money, the ACA promised to make them whole for any losses in any of the first decade’s years. At the end of each fiscal year, the insurance companies merely had to document their losses, and the government would reimburse them out of ACA funds provided for by the law.
The possibility of their losing money was referred to as the “risk corridor,” and the ACA explicitly filled those risk corridors with a guarantee of making the insurance companies, at the very least, whole.
So what happened?
Republicans passed bills to stop making insurance companies whole for losses obtained by taking on people with preexisting conditions.
As The New York Times noted on December 9, 2015, “A little-noticed health care provision slipped into a giant spending law last year has tangled up the Obama administration, sent tremors through health insurance markets and rattled confidence in the durability of President Obama’s signature health law.”
Rubio and a number of other Republicans had succeeded in gutting the risk corridors. The result was that, just in 2015, end-of-fiscal-year risk corridor payments to insurance companies that were supposed to total around $2.9 billion were only reimbursed, according to Rubio himself quoted in the Times, to the tune of around $400 million. Rubio bragged that he’d “saved taxpayers $2.5 billion.”
And, indeed, he had. But the insurance companies were thrown into a crisis. And, with Republicans in Congress absolutely refusing to re-fund the risk corridors, that crisis would get worse as time went on, at least over a period of a few years.
This is one of the major reasons that insurers are pulling out of markets and raising premiums, and it's not really a flaw in the design of Obamacare. Now Trump is threatening to withhold what is left of these payments, and only approving payments one month at a time. This makes it a whole lot harder for insurance companies to do business.
So when rates go up and insurers pull out of markets, I don't think the Republicans can claim innocence. And now that they are the party in power, I think they do have a lot of responsibility to find ways to fix the current situation. Ideally by working with the other party.
You can't have a civil war and govern at the same time. If we want a government, the people currently running things are playing the wrong game. Identify the problem, propose solutions, evaluate them, and execute. Business 101.
Is it biblical? Is it Christlike? Is it loving? Is it true? How can I find out?