Insurance

Your insurance premiums are based on risk. Sky diving enthusiasts have always paid more for life insurance. Having lots of car wrecks will get you very high auto insurance premiums for a long time. Patients with very expensive treatment plans pay more for health insurance, because insurance companies are trying to recoup their losses.

Corporations base their insurance needs on “cash flow”; if they can self-insure part of their losses, they get a lower premium for property, casualty and workers’ compensation coverage. When corporations had their own Medical Plan Trusts, we bought reinsurance coverage to handle claims over $50,000. The premiums were low and they paid all the medical claims for treatments that exceeded $50,000. These Medical Plan Trusts were always cheaper than using a health insurance company. Congress scuttled these plans in the 1990s to reward health insurance companies for their campaign contributions.

Health insurance doesn’t follow these rules. The problem with Obamacare is that premiums are high and deductibles are high.  The reason is that those with this insurance are donating most of their premium to really sick people who are poor.

Health insurance companies got the government to pass Medicare to duck the cost of retiree medical costs and then got them to pass Medicaid to duck the cost of covering poor people.

Obamacare went after healthy people to pay for the rest of the sick and poor people with excessive coverage. American voters rejected this and elected Trump to return to paying for the coverage they really need.

In the 1990s, Congress thought it made sense to force health providers to treat illegal immigrants regardless of their ability to pay. This caused “cost shifting” and ran up the cost of medical treatment and hospital bills for everybody else.

Providing medical treatment to the poor was much better when counties funded hospitals and clinics for the poor and doctors volunteered a day a week to treat the poor.

The end result of letting the federal government take over funding of medical costs has proven to be a financial disaster for taxpayers. But we will probably see the government add a third bureaucracy to deal with the very expensive sick and poor coming out of Obamacare.

Norb Leahy, Dunwoody GA Tea Party Leader