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December 18, 2013 at 11:10 AM
I’ve just been too swamped with writing about Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act Version 1.0 minutiae to write much about PPACA 2.0 efforts, but, clearly, PPACA 2.0 efforts are heating up.
Either PPACA Version 1.0 just plain goes away, or it evolves pretty quickly into 2.0. (Maybe 1.5 by, say, March 31.)
It seems to me that disability insurers have a stake in protecting the PPACA provisions that keep health insurers from using personal health information other than age to adjust health insurance prices, or to use any personal health information to decide whether people get coverage.
In the short run, those provisions will jack up medical insurance prices. When (if?) the market settles down, and insurers and consumers get used to the new rules, maybe the rules will increase prices modestly but make life a lot easier for people with health problems.
The good thing for life and disability insurers is that the medical underwriting rules will give smart, relatively well-educated people with health problems — the sorts of people with chronic health problems and nagging risk factors who are quite familiar with the desirability of personal protection insurance — a financial reason to be honest about their health and not try to “clean sheet” themselves.
The PPACA underwriting rules use affordable (well, theoretically affordable) health insurance premiums to pay people to tell their doctors about their high blood pressure and the uncle who died of leprosy.
That thought came to me as I was going through the written witness testimony posted today for the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee hearing on data brokers.
