4 ms·

considering that pre-existing conditions can no longer be considered for health-care service, there's less things to worry about. Employers, on the other hand.

• gms7777 13y ago
  > considering that pre-existing conditions can no longer be considered for health-care service, there's less things to worry about. They can't be considered now. There's nothing to say that a few years down the line that won't change.
• chimeracoder 13y ago
  > considering that pre-existing conditions can no longer be considered for health-care service, They can no longer be grounds for refusing coverage. They certainly are used in determining the price of your premiums. The ACA is not the panacea that people sometimes seem to think it is. There are tons of ways the insurance company can use any data they have on you in their own best interest[0], making your life miserable in the process. Jacking up premiums is just the tip of the iceberg. EDIT: As pointed out by aestra, there are other laws protecting use of particular types of information (eg. genetic information). My comment is simply a response to the quoted statement that "pre-existing conditions can no longer be considered for heath-care service [due to the ACA]", which is false. [0] Which may or may no coincide with your best interest
  • aestra 13y ago
    Using genetic information to determine price of premiums was made illegal by the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act of 2008 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_Information_Nondiscrimination_Act http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_Information_Nondiscrimi...
  • Aaronontheweb 13y ago
    Why shouldn't pre-existing conditions be used to determine the price of your premiums? It directly impacts the amount of the insurance you're going to consume. Doesn't seem any different that how a poor driving record impacts the price of your auto-insurance.
    • nitrogen 13y ago
      There's a moral argument to be made here. By the moral argument, pre-existing conditions, especially those not associated with voluntary behaviors like smoking, shouldn't affect insurance premiums because it unfairly penalizes a person for things beyond their control. The point of insurance from the consumer's perspective is to mitigate the risks borne by any individual for black swan medical events, not to provide another reason for the already healthy to feel superior and contribute even less money to the collective insurance pool. Unlike many health conditions, poor driving is something the driver can change, either through conscious choice or through additional driver training.
      • mikeash 13y ago
        Another interesting way to look at it is that insurance is fundamentally based on future uncertainty. Imagine if it somehow became possible to predict with perfect accuracy a person's future payouts under a given insurance policy. Bob goes to buy house insurance and they can predict with certainty that he'll eventually get $400,000 paid out (presumably because his house got destroyed somehow) while Steve is predicted to have nothing paid out. If the insurance company has access to these predictions, they will naturally charge Bob about $400,000, plus a profit margin, while they'll charge Steve next to nothing. In this situation, insurance policies become nothing more than elaborate savings accounts. On the other hand, if the clients have access to these predictions, Bob will buy the best policy he can find, while Steve will naturally not buy any policy. In this scenario, insurance companies all go out of business instantaneously because it becomes impossible to make any money, or even break even. Yet both sides have huge incentives to try to approximate these scenarios as best they can. The better insurance companies can predict people's insurance usage, the more profitable they can be. The better clients can predict their own usage, the less they spend. But let both parties achieve their predictive goals and the whole thing falls apart utterly. Medical science is driving relentlessly toward that goal, to the extent that many people were being shut out. The ACA tries to attack both sides of it, by preventing insurance companies from charging differing prices based on certain predictive information, and by preventing clients from refusing to purchase the product. In theory, this returns you to a flatter risk pool where all people contribute roughly equally and everybody sort of pretends they don't know that Bob's house is going to burn down.
  • dmm 13y ago
    The ACA applies a partial community rating that requires insurers to offer the same premium to all applicants of the same age and geographical location without regard to gender and most pre-existing conditions.
    • Amadou 13y ago
      I've been casually looking for confirmation of that one way or the other for a few months now and my google-fu was not up to the task - and reading the ACA isn't really an option either, because of length and my own lack of domain knowledge. Do you have a definitive citation spelling that out (and any possible loopholes)?
      • charlieflowers 13y ago
        I saw it on HealthCare.gov when I registered for insurance through the "exchange." (Yes, it worked for me ... finally). I don't have a link for you, but I saw it. And any number of articles on the internet make the same statement. Only age, whether or not you use tobacco, and geographic area are factored into your premiums.
• sneak 13y ago
  > considering that pre-existing conditions can no longer be considered for health-care service The US is not the whole world.