by digby
The following numbers reflect how long most people are in the private insurance market:
Less than 6 months: 48.2 percent
6-12 months: 16.3 percent
13-18 months: 13.7 percent
19-24 months: 4.8 percent
More than 24 months: 17 percent
That’s kind of interesting, isn’t it? Of the already small percentage of Americans who aren’t covered by Medicare, the VA or their employer’s insurance policy, only half of them have to buy private insurance for more than 6 months. The turnover in that market is already very high so “keeping your policy if you like it” isn’t even relevant for most people. Most are only dealing with this market temporarily anyway.
Honestly, I understand why people are freaking out. You get one of these letters, as I have, and the numbers are scary. Unless you understand this new system you’re going to be unnerved to say the least — especially if you can’t get the information you need from the web-site to see what the new plans are going to cost. But in my view, most people will eventually figure out what they need to do simply because the insurance bill is such a big one, even if you only have to use it for a short time.
I don’t happen to think that the President’s proposal to allow insurance companies to extend the shit plans for a year is the end of the world. They already “grandfathered” shit plans from before 2010 so it’s not a huge deal to do the same thing for the bad plans the insurance companies wrote between then and now. Most people aren’t going to keep paying for crappy coverage once they see they can do better. The problem now is that they have no way of seeing that and don’t have a clear understanding of how the plan works. With a little time, they will be able to do that.
And keep in mind that nearly 50% of the people who are buying insurance on the private market are only doing it temporarily anyway. When new people come into the market they will simply go to the (hopefully working) exchange website and buy new policies without any of these concerns about these cancellations.
The problems with the rising premiums for certain people were anticipated by some of us. (And anyone who’s ever been through an IT project in a corporation know that they never, ever, ever work right at first.) And we all know that Obamacare is, at best, a work in progress that is going to need big fixes for a long time to come. Progressives hope that we will eventually have public options and single payer “fixes.” Changes are a necessary part of it and I don’t see any good reason not to just say that upfront. And anyway, pretending that it’s perfect when it clearly is not is not going to be politically sustainable.
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