Care4all
Warrior Princess
- Mar 24, 2007
- 74,072
- 28,951
well, too bad for them....no, they are not....they are comprised of private insurance companies, all in it for a profit. The public option or non profit option, were groups that provided health insurance without keeping excess profit, but returning any profit to the insured by lowering their insurance premiums.The state insurance pools are the "Public Option". The current ACA is unlike the Obamacare crap they tried to pass at first, it is Romneycare that truly allows you to have private insurance or join the more expensive state run pools. Here is Missouri's State & Federal Health Insurance Pool.
It has been proven that non-profit health insurers can't bend the cost curve as well as for profits. This same ACA plan has been enacted in Massachusetts since 2006. Non-profit insurers did not perform as well as for profit insurers.
5 painful health-care lessons from Massachusetts: ...Massachusetts is vilifying prestigious, non-profit insurers, and punishing them, believe it nor not, with price controls. In April, Governor Deval Patrick refused the request of carriers such as Harvard Pilgrim, the top-rated plan in the country, for premium increases of 8% to 32%. Instead, his administration is refusing all rate hikes over 7.7%; any rate requests the administration rejects are automatically held at 2009 levels.
In explosive emails released last week, Robert Dynan, chief of the financial analysis unit at the Division of Insurance, told Commissioner Joseph Murphy that the price caps would cause a "potential train wreck" and threatened "catastrophic consequences for the non-profit industry." Dynan warned that the non-profits, unlike national giants such as WellPoint (WLP, Fortune 500), operate on such slim margins that the controls could drive them into bankruptcy. Even now, four of the biggest insurers are threatening to stop taking new patients at rates so low they lose money on each new enrollee.
my State has stopped the Private insurance companies from taking a double digit percentage hike as well, not too long ago....the insurance company then sued....it went to court and was upheld.
the non-profit Harvard Pilgrim as with the private insurance company here trying for a huge hike in premium costs, had to show PROOF of why they needed the hike....the insurance company here could not prove they needed to raise their prices as much as they were asking to and it appears that that Harvard Pilgrim could not prove they needed the hike that high in massachusetts as well.... of course they both said they needed the hike to stay in business, what else are they going to say?
edit:
And that means there is no Public Option in the Exchanges, as I said earlier.
Last edited: