TERRY O'NEILL: All right. We've been told over and over again that gender rating is gone, but it's not. Employers with more than 100 employees who buy into a plan on an exchange, the insurance companies will be permitted to charge higher premiums up to, up to 50 percent higher for women than for men, just because they're women. Age rating. We talked about that before. The triple premiums being paid by older people has a disproportionate impact on women. So these are the issues that we see that are problematic. http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/03262010/transcript4.html When employers have to pay up to three times for the health care of older workers and another 50% more if these workers happen to be female, women, esp older women ,will have an even harder time finding time. All older workers, male or female, will have a much harder time finding work than it is now. And it is not easy now!
As with ALL "government solutions" to problems, this bill will have enough unintended consequences to make your head spin. The problem is that HC is 16% of our economy, so it will have far more unintended consequences, and they will affect just about everyone. I think for a small handful of people (20 mil or so), who currently are not insured, but also do not qualify for medicaid, this bill will probably work in their favor. However for the vast majority of people, including many that are currently uninsured by choice (most young people), we'll soon find out that we're HUGE losers in this equation.
Where exactly do you get this fact that there is a cap on what insurers can charge men or women? All I know from factual experience, is that they could raise ann prems 40-70% (gender unspecific) even before the plan was enacted. What I'd like to know is where in the passed plan places any type of caps on ridiculous annual premium hikes for independent workers (i.e. full time traders). There was supposed to be something about forcing 80% to go towards actual health costs (non administrative), but I don't know if that actually went through, anyone? Can you imagine compounding at 50%+/annum, legitimately? Even Madoff would be proud.
All of these details... the reason they didn't want us to read and understand the provisions of the bill... so that we don't complain. Of course, many of these things come as a surprise to Congressional Dems... BECAUSE THEY DIDN'T EVEN READ THE FARKIN' BILL!!
My understanding is that the premiums will be based on income. So the 28 year old making $100k as an engineer is going to be paying the same as a 60 year old making $100k The example I read was that a typical single wage earner making $44k will pay $5800 in premiums with a $2k deductible. Family of 4 making $100k will pay $15k in premiums and a $4k deductible.
Exactly! This was mention on PBS a couple of weeks ago Health care industry got the bill they lobbied for to help maximize their bottom line: 1. Government forces everyone to buy insurance and subsidizes it= tens of millions of new customers! 2. No capping of premiums And it's actually marketed to the people as a good thing. It does have some small positive things but it's another outrageous example how big industry controls government to get what they need and the hell with the unwashed masses
Most of the presumed benefits won't be available to poor uninsured individuals until 2014. In the main time, the insurance companies can do work the system to their advantage. from the NY Times How Different Types of People Will Be Affected by the Health Care Overhaul http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/03/24/us/politics/20100319-health-care-effect.html?emc=eta1