In February, the Trump administration announced that it was going to allow insurers to sell short-term, limited-duration health insurance plans to individuals. Reaction to this plan was, let us say, quite mixed.
“If consumers think Obamacare premiums are high today, wait until people flood into these short-term and association health plans,” industry consultant Robert Laszewski told Kaiser Health News. “The Trump administration will bring rates down substantially for healthy people, but woe unto those who get a condition and have to go back into Obamacare.”
Meanwhile, the headline at Investor’s Business Daily cried “Trump Throws A Lifeline To Millions Of ObamaCare Victims.”
Who was right? Well, the Kaiser Family Foundation has released a new report on these plans that might help shed some light on the matter. Ultimately what it tells us, however, is a lot less than we’d like to know.
Start with the plans themselves: What will they look like? According to Kaiser, here are the key features:
- Unlike other policies (even before Obamacare), they aren’t guaranteed to be renewable. If you want to renew, you have to go through the whole process of buying a policy again. Which matters because:
- These policies are medically underwritten. Yes, this means the return of the dreaded “preexisting conditions,” for which insurers can charge you more or simply refuse to sell you a policy. They include not just prior illness but also age and sex.
- They don’t have to cover “essential health benefits” — maternity, mental health, prescription drugs.
- They can have lifetime caps on how much they pay out for your condition.
- They can have monster deductibles and otherwise increase your out-of-pocket expenses over the Obamacare caps.
- They’re not subject to a bunch of regulations on insurers that limit insurer discretion on how much they charge and how much they spend on care.
