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In this week’s edition of “Health Care is Not About Health Care,” Megan McArdle describes another surprising ObamaCare outcome:

(ObamaCare’s high risk pools) signed up just 18,000 people as of March … It was estimated by Medicare’s Chief Actuary that around 400,000 would sign up …

What are the requirements for getting into those high risk pools?

But the requirements aren’t really all that stringent.  You have to have been denied coverage by an insurer or offered insurance at a rate twice or more what a healthy person would pay.

So, that would obviously include all those thousands of people who are being dropped from coverage for pre-existing conditions too, at least that’s what my neighbors tell me despite never knowing a single person this happened to. And how about this one:

The only argument that makes even a little bit of sense is that the premiums are high.  But the people doing the projections knew that the premiums were going to be high.  And besides, they’re not, like, insanely high; the average monthly premium in North Carolina is $285 with a $3500 deductible, down from maybe $400 last year

Megan is being way too diplomatic. For someone with NO pre-existing conditions these premiums are nothing. My family coverage here in Rochester for a high deductible catastrophic plan (I save $2,400 per year in an HSA and my deductible is something like $5,000) is over $900 per month. My wife and I are in our mid-30s and healthy and part of a “low cost” group health plan through the U of R.

And now, of course, for the political fallout (and illustrative of the sham that our entire world has become):

The administration is now loosening the requirements (you just need a note from a doctor or nurse saying you’ve been sick in the last year) and lowering premiums.  But this doesn’t mean that they’re finally covering more “uninsurables”; it just means they’ve decided to use the money allocated for those people to cover someone else.  They’re changing the “high-risk pools” to something that looks a lot more like simply subsidizing insurance.  But the goal wasn’t to spend the $5 billion that HHS got in its budget; the goal was to provide insurance for people who want to buy insurance, but can’t find a company willing to write it.

Gosh, I am the most cynical person in Western, NY and not even I would have foreseen this coming.

One Response to “400,000, Did Someone Say 400,000? We Meant 18,000.”

  1. Harry says:

    This evening as I was driving, I had WHYY, our local NPR station on, and was not paying much attention until I heard the phrase, “her testicular cancer.”

    I paid enough attention while driving that the subject was government insurance coverage for transvestites, some of whom evidently have lost coverage from Blue Cross.

    When the world is going to Hell, how does respond? By being sympathetic in fulfilling each person’s peculiar fantasies?

    Fifteen minutes later, I drove by the tee on #8, and thought of a great time.

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