Beginning of the End for Major Health Insurers

[Jackpine Radical]

61. My personal view is simply that, on balance, it is better than what went before.

It is still majorly flawed, one of the biggest flaws being simple that the insurance companies are able to continue in their parasitic role, sucking value out of the system and adding to the costs.

On the other hand, there is the end of the pre-existing condition exclusion, ant the ability to continue your kids on your insurance as dependents until age 26.

A really huge flaw, one that could be fixed only by a single-payer system, is that there are no cost savings here. We continue to dump 18% of GDP into health care (still not managing to insure everyone) while the civilized parts of the world only spend 9 or 10% of their respective GDP on health care while insuring everyone.

I am also very disturbed that the cheapest plans still have large deductibles ($3-5,000) and 40% co-pays that will continue to make health care unaffordable for the people on the bottom, who are of course the very ones unable to afford better coverage.