Talk of The Villages Florida - View Single Post - United Health Care Drops Individual Coverages for 2017
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Old 06-29-2016, 11:28 AM
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blueash blueash is offline
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UHC is exiting individual plans in most of the country to focus on their group insurance plans. It is likely other carriers will see this as an opportunity and enter the market. Adverse selection has been an issue making the pricing of individual policies a guessing game. Healthy people don't buy individual plans as they perceive them as too expensive (until something happens and they see what huge bills they receive). However people with chronic illnesses are happy to pay for insurance knowing that they are likely to save more than they spend. In a group plan you get the healthy and the unhealthy people with a slight bias toward healthy as persons with severe illness are less likely to be employed where most of the group coverage is issued. The exact opposite for individual plans. This is why there is such a big difference in the insurance cost for buying your own plan vs getting it as a member of a group. The insurance company knows that if you are buying individual health insurance you are more expensive to cover, generally. And if they guess wrong and charge 20% more when the bills come in at 30% more, they have lost $$$. And as they raise prices for individual plans, to cover this adverse selection, more healthy people decide not to get insurance and the remaining consumers are even more likely to be expensive. This is why the ACA required all of us to get covered, to lessen adverse selection. But it didn't work as the penalties for not getting coverage are too low to act as a deterrent.
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