Via David Dayen, a story that might have gotten overlooked during Netroots Nation from MSNBC:
WASHINGTON — Some major health insurance companies have stopped issuing certain types of policies for children, an unintended consequence of President Barack Obama's health care overhaul law, state officials said Friday.
Florida Insurance Commissioner Kevin McCarty said in his state UnitedHealthcare and Blue Cross Blue Shield have stopped issuing new policies that cover children individually. Oklahoma Insurance Commissioner Kim Holland said a couple of local insurers in her state have done likewise....
The major types of coverage for children — employer plans and government programs — are not be affected by the disruption. But a subset of policies — those that cover children as individuals — may run into problems. Even so, insurers are not canceling children's coverage already issued, but refusing to write new policies.
The Affordable Care Act requires that insurers cover kids, regardless of medical problems. This is one of the most important and most popular elements of the bill, and one that appears to have a loophole allowing insurers who carry policies that would cover children as individuals to just not offer them. The reason? All those irresponsible and greedy parents who won't bother to insure their kids until they're sick. Really:
"Our plans are very concerned about this," said Alissa Fox, a top Washington lobbyist for the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association. "If the law says that insurers have to take you any time, any place, some people will see that as an opportunity to wait until their children get sick to buy coverage."
A psychologist might call that projection--insurers are so used to figuring out how to game the system, exploit loopholes, and circumvent regulations, that's just business as usual. So regular people must take the same approach to buying insurance, right?
On the same day that MSNBC reported on that, this happened.
When people think of deficit reduction, they tend to think about spending cuts and tax increases. They don't think as much about saving money by putting more effective policies into place. But as the Congressional Budget Office's analysis of a new public option proposal from Pete Stark suggests, maybe they should.
Stark wants to add a public option to the exchanges that would start by paying doctors the rates Medicare pays plus 5 percent, and then grow with the cost of physicians' services. According to the CBO, this plan's premiums "would be 5 percent to 7 percent lower, on average, than the premiums of private plans offered in the exchanges." But that's not all!
"The proposal would reduce federal budget deficits through 2019 by about $53 billion," CBO says. And because the public plan is saving more money as time goes on, if you extend that out to 2020, the savings to the government are $68 billion. That implies a savings of $200 billion or so in the second decade. That's a lot of money, and it's in addition to the savings for consumers.
We could still have a plan that takes all comers and saves a helluva lot of money, to boot.