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Published Monday, Dec. 10, 2012 | 11:19 a.m.
Updated Monday, Dec. 10, 2012 | 11:53 a.m.
WASHINGTON — Your medical plan is facing an unexpected expense, so you probably are, too. It's a new, $63-per-head fee to cushion the cost of covering people with pre-existing conditions under President Barack Obama's health care overhaul. The charge, buried in a recent regulation, works out to tens of millions of dollars for the largest companies, employers say. Most of that is likely to be passed on to workers. Employee benefits lawyer Chantel Sheaks calls it a "sleeper issue" with significant financial consequences, particularly for large employers. "Especially at a time when we are facing economic uncertainty, (companies will) be ...
Pre-existing condition clauses are the biggest rip-off scam that insurance companies continue to perpetrate on the public. You could be free and clear of cancer for 10 years and the insurance industry will continue to label you "pre-existing" and just deny coverage. They do this with a whole gamut of health issues that people have resolved but insurance companies continue to call you "pre-existing". It's a scam to deny coverage. If the auto insurance industry worked this way and denied people coverage outright for a ticket from 10 years ago the general public would riot.
ROFLMAO
I wonder what the Obama cult members have to say about this?
...and so it begins....
Sensible insurance reform is needed...but the right didn't want to bend, so this is what they get when they lose an election. It's not the best solution, but it's better than doing nothing and allowing insurance companies to continue to deny coverage over bogus "pre-existing condition" claims.
Romney himself finally admitted the pre-existing condition denial was a bogus excuse that the insurance companies used across the board and he would have made it a part of any health plan introduced.
This is another tax. If your income taxes don't rise next year because of the expiring Bush tax cuts, this will replace it. If your taxes raise because the Bush tax cuts do expire, this will raise them even more.
TomD,
Don't blame the right for the health care fiasco. They have screwed up plenty of things but this wasn't one of them. The left was bought off during the process with promisses to unions and all other kinds of nonsense.
Thanks for playing though.
One Obama cultist down....many more to follow.
Of course you can blame the right. They didn't want insurance companies to "suffer" the plight of having to insure people who have been free and clear from cancer for 10 years...
The bogus pre-existing stuff was the fixture of the insurance reform bill. The right would have been better off getting on board. Now they get it shoved down their throat..agreeable or not.
This miniscule fee will be a non-issue compared to how much insurance premiums will rise after medicaid is expanded by 30% (volume) plus the "standard" 7% - 12% annual medical inflation in 2014.
I predict most private companies will not even offer medical insurance at that time, opting for the much cheaper $2,000 "fine" per employee.
Yawn. Given that individual non group insurance costs at least 13,000 dollars per year in Nevada, 63 dollars is like chump change. Since the pre existing condition trap will be gone the 63 dollars for a year or two is just a talking point.
We know you hate ACA and Obama, but if 63 dollars is all you can kvetch about so be it. Covering preventive care saves you more each year than that.
What else is lurking in that 2,500 page monster?
TomD don't even start blaming the Right. Obamacare is all the Democrats. Republicans had NOTHING to do with it. And what lurks in their that we don't know about since it was passed before it was read?
I bet half the people who post here have pre-existing conditions. Heck, MORE than half. You take a statin drug for high cholesteral - you have a pre-existing condition; you take high blood pressure meds, you have a pre-existing condition. Asthma may even be considered pre-existing because it can lead to serious complications later.
According to insurance companies, pre-existing conditions do not just include the obvious conditions such as diabetes, heart disease, cancer (even though as Tom said you are free and clear), it includes a host of conditions that most people think are not considered pre-existing.