Risk Pools

 

8/26/20: See 2021 pricing update below.

I've written several times before about how health insurance risk pools work. I even whipped up a crude video explainer about them a couple of years back. The healthiness or lack thereof of a given risk pool is the biggest factor involved in determining how expensive or inexpensive insurance policy premiums will be.

This year, my own family became a perfect example of this. Unlike most health insurance horror stories you often hear about, the final results in our case are positive...although we did go through a brief panic attack period before getting there.

My wife and I are both self-employed, and have a few recurring medical issues. We have one child, a teenager with Asperger's syndrome and a (fortunately fairly mild) case of cerebral palsy, which means long-term physical therapy and some other recurring medical expenses. Since we'd max out the deductible on a Silver plan each year, we've been enrolled in an ACA exchange Gold HMO plan since 2015. It's expensive even with partial subsidies, but we don't want to risk a major hole in coverage if at all possible.

 

As promised, here's Part 2 of my Risk Pool explainer video!

Part 1 went over the basics of how risk pools work in general, and why segregating sick people into a separate pool is a terrible idea.

In Part 2, I go into more detail about the different types of NON-ACA plans available on the individual market, why they mostly stink, and how the repeal of the Individual Mandate Penalty, especially when combined with Trump's yanking away restrictions on "short-term" and "association" plans, will take an existing problem and make it far worse.

Oh, yeah: It involves Dabney Coleman and Morgan Freeman.

 

As noted a few days ago, I've posted Part One of my latest crudely-produced-but-hopefully-informative video explainer.

The first part gives an overview of how healthcare Risk Pools actually work and why quarantining sick people into a separate High Risk Pool is such a terrible idea.

The second part, which I hope to post in the next few days, will go into why Donald Trump's recent Short-Term/Association Plan executive order will make a problem which already existed in 2017, and which was made worse by the GOP (by design) in 2018, even worse starting in 2019.

...I'm working on my latest crudely-produced-but-hopefully-informative explainer video!

It's actually a two-parter. The first part gives an overview of how Risk Pools actually work and why quarantining sick people into a separate High Risk Pool is such a terrible idea. The second part goes into why Donald Trump's recent Short-Term/Association Plan executive order will make a problem which already existed in 2017, made worse by design in 2018, even worse starting in 2019.

Here's a sneak peak. I hope to have Part One uploaded this week and Part Two either towards the end of the week or early next week.

UPDATE: OK, Part One is now live for Patreon supporters today! It'll be made public on Thursday. I'm hoping to get Part Two posted by the end of the week at this point.

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