Long before the health care reform bill was signed into law, promises were being made and deadlines were being drawn to make the transition into the new health care reform as smooth and painless as possible. One of the deadlines that came and went was for the establishment of a health care fund to support those families with children under the age of twenty-six.
The new health care reform bill has a full section stating that parent’s are now permitted to keep their young adult children on their personal or employer group health insurance policy until the children reach age twenty-six. Many parents were delighted with the news because the other option was to purchase a separate low cost health insurance policy to cover their children once they turned nineteen years of age.
The deadline came and went and no new start date has been announced. Parents are flooding the telephone lines calling their health insurance provider and receiving very little information. Their children are now listed among the uninsured, leaving many parents to frantically worry. This is also leaving the health insurance provider in a very precarious position because they have no control over the situation.
Now we can add the promised high-risk pools that were to be in effect by the end of June 2010. The millions of uninsured citizens who have been rejected by all health insurance providers because of one or more pre-existing conditions are joining the ranks of the children who turned nineteen. The guaranteed start date for taking enrollments never happened and no one is aware of when it will begin.
If you are wondering what the delay is, the new high-risk pool for citizens with one or more pre-conditions has not been funded. Letters requesting information from the Health and Human Services Department have been sent, but to date there has been no reply. Another twelve million citizens have now joined the ranks of the uninsured because another promise was broken.
We are now finding that the new health care reform bill concerning the high-risk pools was poorly designed. It will not cover the twelve million citizens, only a small fraction. The other problem with the delivery of the high-risk health insurance is that it was only funded to last for one or two years.
Nineteen states across the country have already opted out of the government-run high-risk health insurance pools and there are more states in the wings ready to drop the high-risk health insurance accordingly. The remaining question is where does this leave the citizens who were promised health insurance? Will they still be mandated to pay for a health insurance policy?