Quote:
Originally Posted by rahl
I'm not sure there's anything left to discuss here. You refuse to see how basic insurance principles work, I assume because you are not in the industry. When you force a company to take on people with pre-ex's premiums will rise. When you force a company to put maximums on how much a covered person is responsible to pay premiums will rise. Don't believe me, doesn't matter.
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Is your claim to being right here solely that you "work" on the industry?
Alas, let''s break it down:
You force insurance companies to cover pre-existing conditions. All else being constant, premiums should rise. But all else is NOT constant. By prohibiting companies from risk segmentation like that, you essentially end the practice of competition through coverage of only low risk individuals. Then, of course, you have the other side of the coin: mandatory coverage. With that, you end the adverse selection effects on the other side of the coin: young people not having insurance because they are very low risk. As such, you move towards the ideal of pooling risk across one's lifetime. Premiums would only go up if those currently uninsured were those uninsurable, but that is simply not true. The currently uninsured are mostly low risk young people who are under or unemployed.
With the current system you get closer to the risk pooling ideal of considering the entire lifetime, because EVERYONE will die.
Of course, this is still suboptimal, but in a private insurance for basic healthcare setting it is actually an improvement.