nytimes.com
www.nytimes.com

We don’t need to speculate about how his proposal, such as it is, would work, because we’ve seen this movie; that’s exactly how health insurance worked before Obamacare went into effect in 2014, after which insurers were prevented from discriminating based on medical history. Under the pre-Obamacare system, insurers often refused to cover Americans with pre-existing health conditions or required that they pay very high premiums — which meant that they effectively denied health care, in many instances, those who needed it most.

  • zeppo@lemmy.worldEnglish
    171·
    2 months ago

    Seems like an overly generous interpretation. They want to change this because insurance companies never wanted it, since they don’t want to have to actually pay money out for people who are sick.

    It’s worth noting too that while the article says one idea is of course “todays healthy could be tomorrow’s sick”, a more persuasive point may be that todays sick could be tomorrow’s healthy. Or, even imagine, preventative care. Personally I was self employed in my 20s and 30s and thought it was okay to have no health insurance because I was young and healthy. Self employment is about the worst situation for US health insurance. Turns out I wasn’t healthy. The progression of what was going on with me ended up destroying my productivity. From a societal, financial view, being shut out of medical care was a net loss for everyone - if I’d had access to a relatively small and cheap amount of preventative care, I would have ended up contributing far more in economic activity and taxes over my lifetime, versus now where I consume more in healthcare than I would have otherwise as well.