By- Jolly Roger @ 1:28 AM EDT
First, let me say that I am delighted to be contributing to Suzie’s blog. I am a long time reader, sometime commenter, and constant admirer. The good people posting here are fighting to bring the truth to the fore, and there is no issue before us that is more important than giving the truth a voice. Now, the truth here will take on the form of a bile-coated rock thrown through your window from time to time 🙂
McCavein is really trying to out-ape the ape these days.
We all know how fond Chimpy is of doing the same thing over and over again, no matter how many times its already failed. Johnny, as we can see here, is no different; he’s embracing an insurance program that is already rejected by the vast majority who qualify for it because it is simply too damned expensive for most Americans to handle. Americans with an illness, of course, will be caught in a vicious catch-22; they can go without the insurance and watch their bills skyrocket out of sight, or they can try to make the premiums and find themselves without the means to pay for anything else.
This is yet another example of a politician turning to the source of a problem (in this case a well-helled source that contributes heavily to election campaigns) to supposedly “fix” the problem. The concept of a “high risk pool” is, in and of itself, a guarantee that far too many Americans will never be insured. There is only one viable solution, and that is the unqualified coverage for all Americans. Obama’s plan, though coming up short itself because of HIS reliance on the problem creators to solve the problem, is a far better plan for the mess that is medical insurance in the US.
Of all the Western world, Americans like their healthcare system the least. It’s too expensive, and insurers use too many tricks to try to drive up premiums and deny legitimate coverage. The “high risk” category for medical insurance is an obscenity that has to be removed from the discussion before we can even begin to truly reform the broken healthcare system in America. But hey, if you’re one of those wingtards who hates the idea of giving all Americans an equal chance to pursue happiness, then I’m sure Johnny’s plan is much better to you than any plan that would actually work towards solving the problem.
If Senator John McCain’s radical plan for remaking American health care is to work, he will have to find a way to cover people like Chaim Benamor, 52, a self-employed renovator in this Baltimore suburb. Mr. Benamor never found it necessary to buy insurance before having a mild heart attack last year and now, 13 years shy of Medicare, has little hope of doing so.
The heart attack left Mr. Benamor with a $17,000 hospital bill, $400 in monthly prescription costs and a desperate need for insurance. After being rejected by a number of commercial carriers, he turned to the Maryland Health Insurance Plan, one of 35 state programs for high-risk applicants whom no private company is willing to insure.
He decided that the annual premium – $4,572 for a plan with heavy deductibles – was more than he could handle on an income of about $35,000. Yet his earnings were too high for him to qualify for state subsidies.
“I’d like to get it, but what do you pay first?” Mr. Benamor asked at his dining room table. “Do you pay the mortgage? Do you pay your child support? Do you pay your car insurance? Do you pay for your medicine?”
In late April, Mr. McCain, Republican of Arizona, announced that if elected president he would seek to insure people like Mr. Benamor by vastly expanding federal support for state high-risk pools like Maryland’s, or by creating a structure modeled after them. But as Mr. Benamor’s case demonstrates, even well-regarded pools have served more as a stopgap than a solution.
Though high-risk pools have existed for three decades, they cover only 207,000 people in a country with 47 million uninsured, according to the National Association of State Comprehensive Health Insurance Plans. Premiums typically are high, as much as twice the standard rate in some states, but are still not nearly enough to pay claims. That has left states to cover about 40 percent of the cost, usually through assessments on insurance premiums that are often passed on to consumers.
Health economists say it could take untold billions to transform the patchwork of programs into a viable federal safety net. The McCain campaign has made only a rough calculation of how many billions would be needed and has not identified a source for the fi-nancing beyond savings from existing programs. Finding the money will only get more difficult now that Mr. McCain has pledged to balance the federal budget by 2013, which already requires a significant reduction in the growth of spending.
Mr. McCain’s proposal stands in sharp relief to that of his Democratic rival, Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, who wants to require insurers to accept all applicants, regardless of their health. That is now the law in five states, including New York and New Jersey.
For those who can afford the premiums, or who qualify for subsidies in the 13 states that provide them, the high-risk programs can be a godsend.
Richard and Susan Logan, both of whom have battled cancer this decade, said they were grateful to have coverage for themselves and their daughter through the Maryland plan, even though it will cost $22,232 this year. They had been rejected by 25 commercial insurers, said Mrs. Logan, 57, a part-time billing clerk for a physician.
The Logans, who live in Gambrills, near Annapolis, estimate that without the high-risk pool, they would pay $40,000 a year for medication alone.
“The plan’s worth its weight in gold for that,” said Mr. Logan, 62, an aviation accident investigator. “Otherwise, we’d be paying for the medications out of our retirement.”
A fifth of the 14,000 participants in the Maryland plan receive subsidies that drop their premiums below the market rates charged to healthy people, said Richard A. Popper, the plan’s director. But many in the middle find the policies both unaffordable and intolerably restrictive, and Mr. Popper estimates that two-thirds of those eligible have not enrolled.
Almost all of the state pools impose waiting periods of up to a year before covering the health conditions that initially made it impossible to obtain insurance. In some states, fiscal pressures have forced heavy restrictions in coverage and enrollment. Florida, which has 3.8 million uninsured people, closed its pool to new applicants in 1991, and the membership has dwindled to 313.
An informal survey by the American Cancer Society recently found that only 2 percent of nearly 2,700 callers to its insurance hot line enrolled in high-risk pools within two months of being referred to them. “In most cases, we know they probably didn’t apply because they discovered high premiums or pre-existing condition clauses and just didn’t bother,” said Stephen Finan, associate director of policy for the group’s Cancer Action Network.
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