Funny man, Jon Stewart, recently interviewed Kathleen Sebelius, Secretary of Health and Human Services and asked her to explain the massive health care overhaul in 30 seconds.
It’s an entertaining and fairly thoughtful interview that I many people may find helpful in understanding the new regulations, that will come into full force on January 1st, 2014.
Secretary Sebelius highlighted two key aspects of the law she frequently invokes: 2.5 million more young people are insured and Americans with preexisting conditions can get coverage through high-risk pools.
January 16th, 2012 – According to the DenverPost, Colorado’s high risk health insurance pool, administered by Rocky Mountain Health Plans, took in premiums of $1.4 million, had administrative costs of $1.5 million and had $21.7 million in claims.
This is double the national average for high risk insurance pools. An report on high risk insurance pools run by the federal agency showed 27 percent of claims were coming from high-cost cancer patients.
The “Getting Us Covered” federal insurance pool in Colorado has 1,087 enrollees, with an expected cap of about 4,000.
“These programs are really quite small compared to the need,” said Harold Pollack, a health-policy expert. “There are probably 4 or 5 million Americans uninsured with a serious condition, while Congress funded the high-risk pool for only a few hundred thousand of those.”