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.
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.
