HSA's have all sorts of terrible market distorting effects, for right wingers who sometimes feign concern about waiting lists a policy that makes you choose between spending your money on health care or having it sit useless would seem to set off some warning bells.


I wonder why such committed free market ideologues would overlook this...

Paul Ryan is a good faith wonk, so I'm stumped.

Fly - I'm not getting what you're driving at (unless in some backhanded way you're saying HSA's are bad/poor substitute for most people, which I agree with) - but isn't the point of having the HSA to have money sitting "useless" in an account until you need it for heath care expenses? I tend to agree with Wookie - it's a useful tax free vehicle for additional savings.

I don't see that $3 a month + fees is that out of hand - my HSA has several low fee options.

Or were you against the concept as a whole (which I think a good argument is possible for)?

MM MD

Do not know if this was already posted but it is an article by NYT on association insurance like that proposed to be awesome by Trump.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/21/u...imes&smtyp=cur

I have talked about the realities of big insurance companies putting people through hoops and denying claims pre ACA for individual and small business plans.

I remember researching these association based plans and I think I found an electrician trade association that once actually had a good policy. Otherwise they are almost always highly questionable and you are taking risks you are just dumping your premiums into a hole.

Another thing about Trump’s idea of association coverage is essentially anyone should be able to pool up with anyone else. With that being the case why is there more than one pool at all.

2018 pricing is live....so affordable!

https://www.healthcare.gov/see-plans...ce=govdelivery


Sample rates:

55, 62, 22, 20, 16 year old in 24219 - cheapest plan $2,548.63/month

62 and 60 year old in 20120 - cheapest plan $1,493.83/month

35, 35, 8, 8 year old in 28105 - cheapest plan $1,527.96/month


Anyone without a subsidy is about to get royally screwed. Most healthy people probably won't buy anything at these prices.

Ah, yes, if only we could go back to the glory days when an extra 20 million people were uninsured, and the industry could sell fake "catastrophic," plans that had low lifetime caps and booted people with serious illness off.

If only we could go back to the glory days, when rates didn't spike because of Obama... Oh, wait, that's a load of bull****?

According to a study by Kaiser, the average family premiums went up 20 percent from 2011 to 2016, 31 percent from 2006 to 2011 and 63 percent from 2001 to 2006. (http://time.com/money/4503325/obama-...sts-obamacare/)

That means the ACA slowed down the rate of increase in premiums.

But, I'm sure wj94 has a solution other than going back to the old normal, and other than the nonsense the GOP is peddling...

Don't waste your time on this simpleton dude. He's had the ****ing **** explained to him over and over again and demonstrates no interest in learning about anything outside his little insurance salesman bubble.

We're about to go back to the old days of an extra 20 million uninsured because nobody is going to pay these prices. How many unsubsidized families can afford $1500+/month?

If you think ACA slowed down premium increases you obviously have not been paying attention to what health insurance costs. Pre-ACA my average family plan sold was $400-600/month and that was for the equivalent of what would be considered a Gold level plan today. Now the cheapest plan a family can buy is over $1000/month. That's for a plan with 3x the deductible, higher copays, higher max out-of-pockets, and a garbage HMO network that only extends to a few cities instead of a nationwide PPO network.

The family I quoted above in 24219 would have to pay $4,675.52/month to purchase a Gold plan for 2018. Seems reasonable. That same family composition pre-ACA would have been around $800-1000/month for comparable benefits to the Gold plan.

The link you just quoted from is about group health insurance costs, not individual plans. ACA's largest effect is on individual plans. Apples and oranges...

lol there is no way this is true. it makes no sense.

What makes no sense? That health insurance was affordable once upon a time five years ago? A 60-year-old used to be able to get a $6k deductible HSA plan for $150/month pre-ACA. Now a $6k deductible HSA plan would be over $800/month for a 60 year old. My own HSA plan with $4k deductible was only $40/month when I first moved to Nevada 5 years ago.

I'm going to go ahead and call bull****. Cite the bolded, please. Not some anecdotal family in perfect health you sold to, but some stats on average plan costs with comparable quality of coverage to ACA gold plans for the truly average family (not the average healthy family with high income). Compare something from 2008-2010, just before the ACA, to post-ACA. Anecdotes don't prove anything.

Namath nailed it, though. We all know the truth - you mainly care about how much money you can make selling insurance to people, and how sustainable your industry is - if 20M extra people need to go uninsured to protect the gravy train, then that's an acceptable trade for you.

We know this, because you never offer a solution that would offer universal affordable coverage... You just rant about rising premium costs and pretend it was all hunky dory before the ACA.

A huge part of Obama's campaign was to fix healthcare, because it was so expensive and so many people couldn't access affordable coverage.

You live in an alternate, fact-free reality.

ya I am skeptical that this is true or if it is the fault of obamacare if it is.

Aren't the price increases this year largely because Trump pulled the subsidies (which the markets had anticipated and already priced in)? If so - then it's Obama's fault? Ok.

lol. I have posted examples of pre-ACA pricing in this thread before from actual quotes and policies that I sold in the past (personal info blacked out obviously). The two most popular plans I sold were Anthem SmartSense with a $750 deductible, 30% co-insurance, $3500 out-of-pocket maximum, and Anthem Premier with $2,500 deductible, 0% co-insurance (meaning $2500 is the OOP max total). Here are some real quotes from 2010 of plans that I actually sold. Check out the Monogram plan which had a $7500 deductible and is effectively the same thing as what a Bronze level plan is today, only $445/month for a family of 5 with two parents in their mid-50's. Now that comparable Bronze plan is over $2k/month:













At this point, I make $0 selling individual health insurance. I am no longer selling it, almost all insurance companies are paying $0 commissions to agents on these insanely expensive policies because they don't want the business in the first place. I was smart enough to divert my business to life and disability insurance when ACA was signed into law because I knew exactly how this was going to play out (high premiums, low commissions), and here we are.

I have also stated several times in this thread what I would have done to make this workable. Search my post history in this thread if you want to read it.

"largely" - no. That was part of it, but many of the rates that were filed were not adjusted for the CSR subsidies being pulled. Some states advised insurance companies to file rates as if CSR's would be terminated, some states advised the opposite. The increases are mostly due to adverse selection and extremely high prescription drug costs. Guaranteed coverage for everyone with no cost control is Obama's fault. It is simply not workable when the penalty for not having coverage is so minimal compared to the cost of buying insurance.

plus it's been up in the air if it's going to be repealed

THANKS OBAMA

WJ has some anecdotes to share tho.

WJ show us the data. Not anecdotes, not some cherry picked regional plans, actual legitimate data.

so insurance prices go up as more people get insured. as the pool of people insured increases, so does the prices.

that seems counterintuitive to me.

I would imagine eHealth has a pretty good grasp on the overall market considering they are by far the largest agency in the country...


https://news.ehealthinsurance.com/ne...-shopping-data


and now we are going up another 20-60% depending on your market...

When the people signing up have expensive health issues, of course the prices can skyrocket. How many healthy people with no claims do you need to offset the cost of one person with a $500k/year treatment? These extremely expensive patients need to be separated into their own risk pool funded by the entire country, not compartmentalized into small insurance companies that jack up the rates for everyone in that area. Last year BCBS of Iowa reported they had one single patient with over $10 million a year in claims and that single patient raised the rates for every policyholder in the state by over 10%. See here:

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/...ret/360919001/

Ok, so before we can start comparing what it is we're paying for both pre and post ACA, you need to turn your rambling into a point worth addressing. As such you still need to compare the alleged premium increases we've experienced post ACA to how fast premiums were rising in the years immediately pre ACA.

I don't need to do anything, I'm not your dog bro. Look at the rates that were there before ACA. Look at the rates now. Shouldn't be that hard. Nobody in their right mind can tell me that the rates currently posted on HC.gov for 2018 are anywhere near "affordable" for the average person that doesn't get a subsidy. You basically need to make $250k to afford health insurance for a family now. If you get a subsidy, great, taxpayers eat the cost increase. If you're too "rich" to get a subsidy, sucks for you.

We know how high risk pools work. They all end in death spirals where none of the sick people can afford them.