There's a lot of terrible things to be said about the Baucus Plan. But this item described by RJ Eskow is unforgivable. Baucus ought to be shouted out of the Senate for this one. Older Americans could pay up to five times more in premiums:
The first shocker in the Baucus bill came early on in the draft. Since I've worked in health insurance underwriting I have a certain familiarity with these kinds of numbers. I was stunned to see that the bill allows insurers to charge up to five times as much for some enrollees as for others, based on age. (By contrast, the House draft bill only allows them to charge up to twice as much based on age.)
One of the things we've been hearing from the President and other Democrats is that insurance needs to be affordable to everyone, including those with pre-existing conditions. This new provision, however, is a back-door way to let insurers essentially evade that provision. High-cost medical conditions, including chronic (and therefore pre-existing) conditions, aren't restricted to older people, of course. But they become increasingly common as we age -- so much so that indexing costs to age addresses a lot of the difference. The Baucus bill allows insurers to use age as a proxy for costly medical conditions and make coverage prohibitively expensive for those who need it the most.
Just another item that pushes reform closer to the worst case outcome: that the status quo might actually end up being better than the reform bill.