It is important that we understand that High-Risk Pools are nothing more that corporate welfare for insurance companies that ultimately we all pay for in addition to paying for our own insurance premiums.
Paul Ryan promoting high-risk pools, a corporate welfare program
Obamacare forced insurance companies to provide real insurance without cherrypicking the insured which eliminated high-risk pools. What this means is that as opposed to just being a company skimming funds from mostly healthy individuals and profiting from doing nothing, insurance companies had some skin in the game.
Paul Ryan again misled the American people about high-risk pools.
“High-Risk Pools,” Paul Ryan said. “When you have a risk pool that covers the catastrophic cost of people with catastrophic illnesses, the rest of the insurers, the rest of the insurance pool, don’t have to pay for those costs. So by directly helping support people who have preexisting conditions with their catastrophic cost, all other insurance products don’t have to price that into their insurance, and you dramatically stabilize and lower the price of insurance.”
To be clear, in some form or the other most of us always pay for the decisions of our politicians. Corporations always pass on their costs.
Insurance companies make a bet. They bet you will not get sick. And you make a bet when you purchase insurance. You bet you will get sick. If you don’t get sick, the insurance company pockets your premiums. If you get sick, they pay. The problem is if they lose too many bets, they will pay out more in health care expenses than they take in premiums.
So, the reality is that we have relegated the ability to get health care to us making a bet with health insurance companies. And by charter, the insurance companies must always win that bet to satisfy their shareholders and CEOs, CFOs, Presidents, Vice-Presidents, etc.
Obamacare told them that if they were really health insurance companies, they could not discriminate. To make things fairer, a mandate was instituted to make sure everyone had to have insurance. It was not the best, but in a system where most are still brainwashed into believing that free markets can work for health insurance, it was the best compromise.
But here is what Paul Ryan is saying. Within his Obamacare replacement, insurance companies will no longer have the burden of insuring those with preexisting conditions. Instead, high-risk pools will be set up for the millions with preexisting conditions. This defies logic. If you put all the sick or likely to be sick people into one pool, then you do not spread the risk between healthy and unhealthy people and it costs much more for every individual within that high-risk pool. Insurance companies can make more profit because they insure mostly healthy people.
In effect, Paul Ryan is picking winners and losers. The health insurance companies win. The American people lose. Why? We will all pay premiums to the insurance companies, and some of the taxes we pay will subsidize the high-risk pools. In other words, in the end, the American people pay to ensure health insurance companies are always profitable, and CEOs and other executives can maintain their inordinate unearned salaries.
We must not be fooled, health insurance, and specifically high-risk pools are giveaways to corporations. And they are doing so as they put our health and ultimately our lives at risk.
Donald Trump and Paul Ryan are playing with the lives of every poor and middle-class American. As MSNBC’s Ali Velshi explained, the free market simply does not work for health insurance, period. Chuck Todd recently pointed out that the new plan decimates coverage for all but mostly to the Trump voter.
Learn why Single-Payer/Medicare-For-All is our future.
Call your Senators and Congressional Representatives every day and let them know you do not want the Affordable Care Act repealed. Also tell them they must support H.R. 676, Medicare-for-all. If you do not know how to get in touch with them, click here.