Letting sick residents of Hawaii buy individual health coverage for the same price as healthy people may help the sick people but add about 50 percent to the average cost of individual coverage.
Consultants at Oliver Wyman, a unit of the Marsh & McLennan Companies, give that estimate in a report on the effects of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) in Hawaii.
The Hawaii Insurance Division, an agency in a state that supports PPACA and is setting up a state-based public exchange, commissioned the report.
PPACA is set to forbid individual health insurers from considering health status when deciding whether to issue individual health coverage. The law will also prohibit individual health insurers from considering health status factors other than age when setting individual coverage prices, and they will limit the insurers’ ability to charge the oldest adult insureds more than the youngest insureds.