Before the ACA, there were a handful of ways insurers could balance their risk
pool. One big tactic was just to avoid covering sick people, filtering out
individual customers who appear likely to need lots of expensive medical care.
But Obamacare made that type of discrimination illegal: One big selling point
of the law was that everyone would be eligible to sign up.
Companies that profited off of denying helping people with pre-existing conditions are finding they can't profit anymore? Allow me to play a little ditty on the world's tinniest violin for them.
The honest reality is that these costs did exist before, it's just they were paid by the sick in our society by dying, while the health insurance companies skimmed off the cream from the healthy. No free lunch, right? So this cost existed, only by law, it was pushed onto the healthcare companies after the ACA
It is quite bad though, as the article details, costs have reached 100% of premiums at least in NC it looks like. That is unsustainable, and since the ACA went ahead with requiring healthcare companies to help pull this off, without something like a public option to cover say the super sick, this isn't good news.
All around, this is a bad. But it's not like ACA made it worse, it just made the costs appear somewhere else, and as the article states, absent of any new policy, that cost will shift back to the sick who will have to die again.
The honest reality is that these costs did exist before, it's just they were paid by the sick in our society by dying, while the health insurance companies skimmed off the cream from the healthy. No free lunch, right? So this cost existed, only by law, it was pushed onto the healthcare companies after the ACA
It is quite bad though, as the article details, costs have reached 100% of premiums at least in NC it looks like. That is unsustainable, and since the ACA went ahead with requiring healthcare companies to help pull this off, without something like a public option to cover say the super sick, this isn't good news.
All around, this is a bad. But it's not like ACA made it worse, it just made the costs appear somewhere else, and as the article states, absent of any new policy, that cost will shift back to the sick who will have to die again.