Little Competition, High Premiums In NC Health Insurance Marketplace:
Ok, first I need to get some prefaces out of the way. The first is the usual about I have 20+ years of working in the healthcare administration field. The other is that the article I linked to came out before the October 1st health exchange deadline. I haven’t yet checked to see if North Carolina’s is running yet.
Anyway in North Carolina, and probably a lot of other states, the plans that are being offered by ONE insurance company. They claim that they will offer 20+ different type of plans but only having them offered by one insurer is not really choice. I believe that’s called single-payer and a virtual monopoly. To the surprise of actually no one in North Carolina, the big winner was Blue Cross/Blue Shield.
So you can only have BC/BS if you live in North Carolina and are forced to get your own coverage. UNLESS you live in one of the magic 39 counties that will have a second payer. NC has 100 counties in case you were wondering. Of course, it includes major cities like Charlotte, Raleigh, and Greensboro but for the majority of the state it’s BC/BS or pay your government forced healthcare ‘tax’. However even if you live in one of the magic counties, which I do, I seriously have some doubts about what the other payer will have available. I’m sure they will be over inflated premiums with little to no coverage where the BC/BS conglomerate will look like the only option.
This is exactly the problem that healthcare already had, not enough insurers in the states. As I’ve been saying for years now in most states only one or two insurance companies keep a stranglehold on the healthcare benefits of employees in their respective states. This lack of choice is just making the insurance companies monopolies government approved. And in the magic counties if you do choose the second payer I can only imagine the bureaucratic nightmare a patient would have to go through to get treatment since you’re not using the state’s hand-picked golden child.
The Affordable care act is definitely not affordable but it is just all an act.
The Trench Reynolds Report 
Reading that list made me hate my old county even more. For people who can’t get insurance through their Virginian employers, they only have one single payer. Guess that’s their fault for not being able to afford to move out of a county where most of the population is on the mainland, most of the industry is across the Sound, and locals get the shaft at every turn so the tourists can enjoy their visit.
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