By: Health Insurance
Submitted: 2009-11-04 23:22:08 | Word Count: 513
Federal health care reform will increase individual insurance rates significantly in Ohio, especially for younger healthy people, unless reform bills require every American to buy insurance, the region's leading health insurer warns in a new report
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Proposals currently in the House and Senate could triple rates for a 25-year-old single male, while more than doubling rates for a 40-year-old couple with two children, wrote Anthem Blue Cross & Blue Shield in Ohio.
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A 60-year-old couple with some health concerns would see rates decline 11 percent, the company said.
Those bills are flawed because they don't require everybody, especially healthy people with lower health costs, to buy insurance, Anthem said.
The company, which holds nearly one-third of the market in Greater Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky, said the bills have loosened the so-called "individual mandate," or imposed penalties that are far too low. At the same time, the proposals would require insurers to cover everybody who applies.
"It's critical that everyone is part of the pool," Anthem President Erin Hoeflinger said. "We have seen the impact. If you know you can wait to buy insurance until you're sick or if the penalty doesn't equal the premium, people will make the right financial decision for them. But that increases health care costs."
Col Owens, a senior attorney at Legal Aid Society of Southwest Ohio and co-chairman of Ohio Consumers for Health Coverage, agreed that the system would work better if the pool includes everybody. But he said the way to achieve that is through more realistic subsidies that would allow everyone to afford the coverage they need.
"If you're going to stiffen the mandate, you've got to have money to allow people to get in," he said.
The numbers are only the latest blizzard of statistics in the fight over health care reform. Members of Congress are debating no fewer than five separate bills. They include some level of individual mandate but with different requirements and different levels of subsidy.
A bill from the Senate Finance Committee, for example, would charge penalties starting at only a few hundred dollars for people who did not buy insurance, only a fraction of the cost of an individual policy.
Details of the bills are likely to change dramatically before a final bill is produced.
According to Anthem's study, which uses data on real rates in Columbus, the plans would increase the monthly premium for the 25-year-old single male to $157 from $52. The monthly premium for the 40-year-old parents would increase to $737 from $332, while monthly rates for the 60-year-old couple in Columbus would decrease to $648 from $726.
It said about half of the increase results from the lack of an effective individual mandate
