Just one man's
Now I’m just a simple country boy but I don’t see the President or the ACA as the bad guys here, it’s the shysters who were writing insurance plans that couldn’t cover a week in hospital without meeting your lifetime limit. It’s called junk insurance and I couldn’t give a better name for these kinds of policies.
So these shysters have known for a couple of years now there will be minimum standard requirements. They threw millions of dollars at lobbyists and got forty something defund votes for it. Didn’t work.
They stood by and watched (with more money and cheers) as the Republican Party as a whole made the decision to shut down the government to protect the insurance industries status quo. Didn’t work. What it did do is cost US the taxpayers a tidy sum of 24 billion dollars.
This is high stakes warfare. Profits on these “junk policies” have been reported to be on average 50%. Then the little caveat in the ACA concerning profits. Eighty percent of premiums collected had to go into actual healthcare… meaning they are limited to a 20% profit.
Now this is a simplified example, but pretty much, what was going on.
Now the shysters have lost the battle (maybe), defund votes and the shutdown. The only thing that was left was to carpet bomb the country with cancelation policies. Now they could have accepted the minimum mandates and the 20% profit margins and kept those policies, because there’s an extra 30% to work with.
They didn’t, and that’s all you need to know about these shysters and these policies, it was never about healthcare… it was about profits.
The next plan – short term losses, let the Republican Party and its “Christian-Conservative” mouthpieces pound the President and the ACA website mess and these cancelations, which will be by the very nature of the “intended lie” (you can keep your insurance) will no doubt keep folks away from applying. If this works, then the ACA will be on a death march.
Therefore, the message is:
We never expected that the companies who were writing these junk policies would cancel them rather than meet the minimum standards and work with their policyholders.
If it is as reported, the profit margins on these policies that are being canceled were 50% plus. Now the ACA says that 80% of the premiums go into actual healthcare, leaving a maximum of a 20% profit. If they couldn’t offer the minimum standard with an additional 30% then they probably didn’t need to be in the healthcare industry.
My view, it’s the shysters who are the bad guys here.
P.S. who is doing the strategy and messaging on this? Suggestion, send them out to the streets in middle America before they strategize or do one more line of messaging… they are out of touch.