"National Health Insurance Exchange: The Obama plan will create a National Health Insurance Exchange to help individuals who wish to purchase a private insurance plan. The Exchange will act as a watchdog group and help reform the private insurance market by creating rules and standards for participating insurance plans to ensure fairness and to make individual coverage more affordable and accessible. Insurers would have to issue every applicant a policy, and charge fair and stable premiums that will not depend upon health status. The Exchange will require that all the plans offered are at least as generous as the new public plan and have the same standards for quality and efficiency. The Exchange would evaluate plans and make the differences among the plans, including cost of services, public."
http://www.barackobama.com/issues/healthcare/#coverage-for-allI'm self employed so I can attest to the real cost of health care. If you're contributing $100 or even $300 a month for a family plan at work, you're lucky. The real cost, buying a plan for a family with a reasonable deductible etc., is around $1100-$1300 a month.
If the "exchange" were applied to Medicare pharmacy benefits it would help.
It will do nothing at all, not a thing, to reduce overall health costs to individuals or business buying plans.
There are some good parts of his plan but this "exchange" is really an erroneous assumption masquerading as a program. It assumes that competition is the driver in health costs. It's not. The drivers are a) "for profit" insurance providers; b) the inability of businesses to get decent management companies to administer plans; c) the refusal to negotiate drug discounts for ALL Americans. There are others. I'm no expert but I'm smart enough to know that this centerpiece is a big zero.
On edit: If you work for a medium to large size company, your "insurance" carrier is really a plan administrator. You company is the payer. They negotiate a deal with AETNA, Blue Cross, etc. to run the plan and allocate expenditures based on the company deal with employees. There's a law called ERISA which indemnifies the company from any liability in the way the plan is run. So when you have a beef, you have to sue the provider, not the source of the benefits, which is often times responsible for limitations in benefits. For example, if I need treatment for a new disease, I'll likely get (if it's clinically successful) it since I buy directly from the health insurance carrier; they pay the costs. If I have the very same condition and work for XYZ Corp., the plan manager, lets say the same insurance company I buy from, will likely turn down the treatment as "experimental." The employer, your company, makes sure that happens "to keep costs down" and denies the benefit even if it kills you. Why? Because they can't get sued.
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