Interesting,…Steven Brill that a 3-to-1 ratio between the rates charged for older people and those for the youngest adults is not enough and does not match the relative actuarial costs of insuring those two very different groups. He writes the ratio should really be 5 to 1. Those older people really need to pay five times more for health insurance than (healthier) young people.
BUT we (the people of the United States) should provide more generous subsidies to older Americans to make insurance more affordable to them.
You can’t do that if you are going to use this new Republican healthcare law to provide a tax break to the nation’s richest Americans who got there by work provided by all these older people working producing GDP when they were younger. It’s payback.
AND as Brill points out…
Those increased subsidies could be paid for by new controls on the price of prescription drugs, either by allowing Medicare to negotiate prices or by other mechanisms used by every other developed country, where prices are 30 to 60 percent lower than here. Taking just 15 percent off the price of prescription drugs would produce more than $600 billion in health-care savings over the next decade, which would lower private premiums while saving taxpayers billions on Medicare costs.
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Steven Brill is the author of “America’s Bitter Pill: Money, Politics, Backroom Deals, And The Fight to Fix Our Broken Healthcare System.” He has received consulting fees for work on a consumer information and ombudsman program for New York-based Oscar Health Insurance.