According to the blog briefing room at The Hill, healthcare reform could cost as much as $4,000 a year in higher premiums for every family. This has to do with the concept of the risk pool. Unless the penalty for not having insurance is increased to the point where everyone will have insurance, the risk pool will not be large enough to finance the program.
Just a few notes, I live in Massachusetts where we have a state healthcare program that does require all people in the state to have health insurance. There have been more than a few problems with the program. First of all, it has cost far more than was ever predicted. It has reached the point where hospitals were not being reimbursed in a timely fashion because the state did not have the money--the hospitals were forced to wait until the beginning on the state's fiscal year to get paid. That doesn't solve the problem of excessive cost--it simply pushes it off until the next year. There are also people who had basic healthcare coverage--they paid out of pocket for routine doctor's visits but were covered in case of accident or serious illness. Many of these people were told that their policies did not qualify under the state's insurance requirements--they had to get more expensive policies that covered routine doctor's visits. They were forced to pay significantly more in insurance premiums. Again, this has to do with increasing the risk pool--by requiring all people to carry extensive health insurance, even if they are happy with basic coverage, you increase the amount of money in the system and theoretically everyone pays less. It's a great idea, but it doesn't always work that way.
The bill Congress is voting on Tuesday is a bad bill. It needs to be scrapped and rewritten to include tort reform and portability of health insurance across state lines. Those are the changes that will benefit all of us--not just a few well-connected states.
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