Vincent K Blair Insurance Blog

Some health insurance companies are enacting changes to their policies before the deadlines set by the new healthcare law.  Some examples:

• This month, major insurers will end the practice of "rescission,"  which involves going back and trying to find minor mistakes or omissions in applications when policyholders develop costly illnesses;
• Many insurance companies this spring will also start covering children up to age 26 on their parent’s policies – something they weren’t legally required to do so until September

Health insurers have also decided to cover children with pre-existing conditions, even though the new law contained a loophole the insurance companies might have invoked had they wished to fight the new requirement. 

There is one large caveat to this trend; large businesses which essentially insure themselves and only use insurance companies to administer their plans. These employers will not speed up implementation of the new requirements and indeed may increase premiums when they do.  Read more about all these health insurance developments in this article in the Washington Post.

Will the new health care law bring health care costs down? Not according to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which is part of the Department of Health and Human Services. According to chief actuary Richard S. Foster, total healthcare spending will increase by almost $90 billion over the next 10 years, not decrease, as the Obama Administration asserts.  Foster further predicts that about 14 million people would lose their employer coverage by 2019 as smaller employers terminate coverage, forcing their workers into Medicaid. 
       And remember: Foster's office  is PART of the Obama Administration! 

Not all affordable health insurance plans are created equal... in fact, some are downright scams, as this story from TIME points out. Expect to see more of these cons in the months and years ahead because of the requirement to buy health insurance by the year 2014...

If you don't have time to plow through all 2074 pages of the new health care law, here is a link to a summary and time-line of its major components.  The link will open up a new window to the website for the Kaiser Family Foundation, a non-profit organization and "a non-partisan source of facts, information, and analysis for policymakers, the media, the health care community, and the public." Even with this summary, which is pretty good, there are a lot of details still to be worked out that will have an affect on health insurance, so check this blog often for updates...

Folks, the confusion over the new healthcare law is increasing... for good reason:  it's an extremely complex law with phased-in elements stretching roughly from this September to 2014. Click on this article for a good summary of reaction on the "street":
"New Health Care Law Spawns Mass Confusion"

This is a very honest story about the trade-offs that are inherent in the Senate's version of healthcare reform:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/34352187/ns/health-health_care/

They're throwing around a lot of numbers in Washington about the cost of healthcare reform...for a clear-eyed view of what reform would really cost down the road, read this column by David Broder of the Washington Post:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/20/AR2009112002618.html