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You are here: Home / Anderson On Health Insurance / Carve-outs, uprates and the bad old days

Carve-outs, uprates and the bad old days

by David Anderson|  April 7, 20177:07 am| 10 Comments

This post is in: Anderson On Health Insurance

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Wonkblog at the Washington Post has a good graphic on the typical distribution of healthcare spending in this country. It is super concentrated, and it has almost always been super-concentrated.

This is the key challenge for an insurance based system of health care finance. Most people don’t use a lot of resources in a given year. If there is insurance, a lot of people pay in and get very little out of the system and since health care in the US is so expensive on a per unit basis, people pay in a whole lot without seeing much until they get unlucky. And people rationally will want to limit their exposure and costs as much as possible.

This is where underwriting comes in. In 2013, there were conservative argument that the individual market was functional as people could buy dirt cheap policies compared to Exchange policies:

Let me give you some examples of the policies that he is using to argue rate shock:

Arkansas: $26 per month for a $25,000 deductible 23% applicants denied. 28% uprated.

Ohio: $25,000 deductible, 19% denied, 17% uprated.

It’s not hard to have a dirt cheap premium when you can underwrite out one in five people who have known high cost risk profiles. It is not hard to have dirt cheap standard rates when you can then up-charge another your most expensive third of covered lives by 25% to 200% above standard premiums. It’s not hard to sell insurance to the 50% of the population that never touches the US healthcare system in any meaningful way in a given year. It’s not hard to sell dirt cheap policies that don’t cover maternity, mental health or high cost prescription services.

And it is not hard to get underwritten up. Below is the first page of underwriting guidelines for the old, pre-ACA market.

Here's what a pre-ACA insurance manual looks like. "Coverage at the higher rating" indicates to charge a higher premium for the condition. pic.twitter.com/aD1OtYI5QK

— Topher Spiro (@TopherSpiro) April 5, 2017

I qualify for at least two underwriting up-rates on the first page.

It is just not particularly useful from a societal perspective as costs will be paid somehow. It just shifts the distribution of costs to either individual suffering, higher costs for the sick and general subsidization. Keep this in mind. Costs will be paid, it is a question of who bears the costs.

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Reader Interactions

10Comments

  1. 1.

    Kenneth Kohl

    April 7, 2017 at 7:19 am

    Good god… Personally, I’d hate to see what “C” conditions pages look like…

    Thanks for update/analysis/opinion.

  2. 2.

    Jack the Second

    April 7, 2017 at 7:41 am

    Are my eyes bad, or did *acne treatments* lead to being declined for health insurance?

  3. 3.

    Starfish

    April 7, 2017 at 8:05 am

    I want to see “Female Disorders” like the form tells me to.

    I read a lot about allergies so the rest of you don’t have to. A teenage boy had his source of sustenance denied by his insurance company. His food supplement cost $2k/mo and was his only source of nutrition.

  4. 4.

    Kay (not the front pager)

    April 7, 2017 at 8:19 am

    Wow, now I understand why my kid couldn’t get insurance while he was in college. He had 1 auto-decline and 2 uprate or declines. He was a healthy male non-smoker in his mid 20s but uninsurable.

    We can’t go back.

  5. 5.

    MomSense

    April 7, 2017 at 8:58 am

    I am completely uninsurable under the old system.

  6. 6.

    Baud

    April 7, 2017 at 9:00 am

    @MomSense: If I could, I’d insure you, MomSense.

  7. 7.

    MomSense

    April 7, 2017 at 9:52 am

    @Baud:

    Thanks Baud.

  8. 8.

    StringOnAStick

    April 7, 2017 at 12:59 pm

    Beware, there are rumors they are going to keep talking about how to get an ACHA to pass while they are on break, so attending protests and town halls is even more important now. That rumor includes the idea that they are looking for a drop off in protests as a sign they can get away with it this time.

  9. 9.

    Bob Hertz

    April 8, 2017 at 6:50 am

    If the Republicans who want a return to cherry picking were willing to pay higher taxes for either reinsurance or high risk pools, I might at least listen.

    If we let the healthy have cheap insurance, but then raised taxes by at least $75 billion a year to somehow insure the sick, again I might listen.

    However, the advocates of cherry picking would consign the sick to charity care, Emergency rooms, and declaring bankruptcy.

  10. 10.

    Mnemosyne

    April 8, 2017 at 3:05 pm

    Looking at that single page, I can see three conditions that I have been diagnosed with that would each make me a possible/probable decline, and in combination would probably make me uninsurable: acne, asthma, and ADHD.

    And that’s just the first page!

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