Perhaps because calling it 'Insurance' is really a stretch. Just ask anyone whoever had to use it ...
That Florida woman's canceled Blue Cross policy? It's junk insurance.
by Nancy Metcalf, consumerreports.org -- Oct 29, 2013
Did you recently get a notice saying that your insurance company is canceling your policy because it doesn't meet the new health law's higher standards? Thousands of people are, and many are angry about it. But before you rush to judgement, it might not be as bad as it seems.
Consider the case of Diane Barrette, a 56-year-old woman from Winter Haven, Fla. Her story was featured in this CBS News report and endlessly echoed on the Internet. She was upset because Blue Cross Blue Shield of Florida was canceling her $54-a-month “GoBlue plan 91” and offering to replace it with a $591-a-month “Blue Options Essential plan.”
Sounds terrible -- except that Barrette’s expiring policy is a textbook example of a junk plan that isn’t real health insurance at all. If she had ever tried to use it for anything more than an occasional doctor visit or inexpensive prescription, she would have ended up with tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars of medical debt.
[...]
Paying for 'Junk Insurance" is usually not the problem --
actually trying to use it to offset the cost of any major illness, is where the "junk" litters the GOP health-care highway.
Junk health insurance
Stingy plans may be worse than none at all
from Consumer Reports magazine -- March 2012
[...]
Judith Goss, 48, of Macomb, Mich., believed that the Cigna plan she obtained through her job at the Talbots retail chain was “some type of insurance that would cover something.” When the store she worked at closed in January 2011, she even paid $65 a month to keep the coverage through COBRA.
“I was aware that it wasn’t a great plan, but I wasn’t concerned because I wasn’t sick,” she says. But in July 2011 she was diagnosed with breast cancer, at which point the policy’s annual limits of $1,000 a year for outpatient treatment and $2,000 for hospitalization became a huge problem. Facing a $30,000 hospital bill, she delayed treatment. “Finally my surgeon said, ‘Judy, you can’t wait anymore.’ While I was waiting my tumor became larger. It was 3 centimeters when they found it and 9 centimeters when they took it out.” After a double mastectomy, radiation treatments, and reconstructive surgery, Goss is taking the drug tamoxifen to prevent recurrence.
The Talbots Cigna Starbridge plan is one of many similar mini-med insurance products aimed at workers in industries such as retail, food service, and temporary staffing agencies. Their hallmark is extremely limited benefits, often, as with the Talbots plan, no more than a few thousand dollars a year. A Cigna promotional brochure touts the plans as “coverage for everyone” and reassures employers that they don’t have to contribute to the cost of the coverage if they don’t want to.
[...]
It surprising they just didn't sell the self-insured, some
Insurance Derivatives too. Maybe some "
dead peasant" insurance to their employers too?
Whatever the market will bare, right? Such is the old-school "unaffordable" way ...
The Republican Obamacare anchor-carriers are all hot and bothered by their latest outrage -- the spot-cancelling of these 'Junk Insurance' policies. Apparently, the People have a right to be duped by Insurers!
All the fury because the new Affordable Care Law actually requires insurers to provide real Health Care at an affordable cost to consumers. Therefore, most Junk policies have a very hard time filling that consumer-based bill. That or the deflating of their insane profit margins have constrained these 'Junk Insurers' so much -- by all the loopholes and exceptions being closed by the new law -- that they have decided to peddle their scams 'wares' elsewhere.
But don't take my word for it. Take it from Consumer Reports and the LA Times ...
Obamacare hysteria: Don't believe the canceled insurance hype
by Michael Hiltzik, LATimes.com -- Oct 30, 2013
Back in March, Consumer Reports published a study of many of these plans and placed them in a special category: "junk health insurance." Some plans, the magazine declared, may be worse than none at all.
Consumer Reports is right. Plans with monthly premiums in the two figures marketed to customers in their 30s, 40s, or even 50s invariably impose ridiculously low coverage limits. They've typically been pitched to people who couldn't find affordable insurance because of their age or preexisting conditions, or who were so financially strapped that they were lured by the cheap upfront cost.
"People buy a plan that's terrible," says Nancy Metcalf, CR's senior project editor for health, "and if they get sick, they don't even know they don't have insurance."
[...]
There's a reason why 'Junk Insurance' is Cheap ...
The reason?
It's Junk. Calling it "insurance" is an insult to ... the idea of safe-guarding your future well-being, and that of your family's ...
Isn't it time, we stopped being insulted, by such Shiesters ...?