[quote=dumbrenter]this plan is for poor people[/quote]
I get the qualifications for Federal help to pay their premiums but what I DON’T get is how the average “poor person/family” is going to pay nearly $13K out-of-pocket if one of them just happens to land in the hospital.
They’ll just end up getting a medical judgment lien against them. If they don’t own any property, it will prevent them from ever buying any.
Medical providers are notoriously aggressive in collecting unpaid bills.
So what’s the point? Right now, CA hospitals can’t refuse to treat the uninsured. If they don’t qualify for Medi-Cal, the hospital seeks “charity care” for them to pay some or most of their bill and then usually writes the rest off.
The “poor” who have no aspirations to buy RE don’t really care about their credit ratings.
All the “CoveredCA” program is going to do is “spread the pain” of the low-income chronic medical-care users (not necessarily “sick”) among the carriers who currently write policies in CA, who will in turn raise the premiums (again and again, as in the past) of their current individual policyholders who are “grandfathered” and thus “trapped.” The vast majority of these policyholders had to “medically qualify” for their policies.
“Poor people” have no business using HDHP’s, IMHO. But the only other alternative is to issue them more comprehensive plans similar to the Kaiser HMO model but “ration care” for them and who would decide what to ration? It’s a slippery slope.
