I hate to rain on the parade, but this bill is going to be extremely costly to everybody. It is a gimme to the insurance companies, drug companies and hospitals. Now there will be no shopping prices, no real effort in trying to reduce the costs. It guarantees the payments to ‘big industry’. Remember, who is supposed to ‘watch over insurers’.. and who was it that ‘bailed out banks’.. Instead, the money gets silently taken from peoples pockets with them barely recognizing why. If you fail to participate in the scheme, you are fined. All that people know is that less money is available out of their paycheck.
From personal experience, the total cost of paying it myself, when I got real sick (even turned yellow – jaundice) was $2100. That is the first time I had been really sick in over 20 years. In stead of paying insurance, it has been saved and invested.
I guess that people forgot what happened when mandatory auto insurance was legislated in California. It was supposed to reduce costs, but had the opposite effect. The insurance companies had forced customers. They would assign higher risk profiles to people than they really were.. driving up the fees. It got to the point that the people in California had to create yet another bureaucracy to control auto insurance prices.
There was only one good portion of the bill, as far as I am concerned. Preventing companies from dropping an insured after illnesses have occurred. Technically, this is breach of contract on the part of the insurance companies but it is hard to fight when you are ill.
One of the other items that bothered me about the bill is how it was kind of ‘end-runned’ around the process. If you always take the approach that the ends justify the means, you compromise your integrity. If it turns out that the real ends were really not what you intended or anticipated, it compromises much more
