Ever heard of a “skinny” health insurance policy? Michael Barone‘s latest column at Human Events suggests more people will learn about this type of policy, thanks to ObamaCare.
You might be wondering what a “skinny” or “low-benefit” insurance plan is. The terms may vary, but the basic idea is that policies would cover preventive care, a limited number of doctor visits and perhaps generic drugs.
They wouldn’t cover things such as surgery, hospital stays or prenatal care. That sounds similar to an auto insurance policy that reimburses you when you change the oil but not when your car gets totaled.
You might ask how Obamacare could encourage the proliferation of such policies. It was sold as a way to provide more coverage for more people, after all.
And people were told they could keep the health insurance they had.
As [Wall Street Journal reporters] Weaver and Mathews explain, Obamacare’s requirement that insurance policies include “essential” benefits such as mental health services apply only to small businesses with fewer than 50 employees.
But larger employers, they write, “need only cover preventive service, without a lifetime or annual dollar-value limit, in order to avoid the across-the-workforce penalty.” Low-benefit plans may cost an employer only $40 to $100 a month per employee. That’s less than the $2,000-per-employee penalty for providing no insurance.
“We wouldn’t have anticipated that there’d be demand for these type of Band-Aid plans in 2014,” the Journal quotes former White House health adviser Robert Kocher. “Our expectation was that employers would offer high-quality insurance.”
Oops. It turns out that Friedrich Hayek may have been right when he wrote that central planners would never have enough information to micromanage the economy.
