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Obamacare's Pre-Existing Condition Pool Has Less Than 1% of the Country Enrolled

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Thursday, 18 October 2012 13:08

Written by Justin Credible

One of the principle hoaxes pushed by the White House and Democrats was that Americans needed health care reform because people with pre-existing conditions are denied care.  This was a strategy to play on people's emotions so they'd support Obamacare.  As we reported, pre-existing conditions effect a sliver of the population - states have high risk pools to help these people.  However, pre-existing conditions were sold as a reason health care needed to be rewritten.  It turns out that less than 1% of the population has benefited from this change.

Obama sought to destroy and rebuild the health care system under the notion that pre-existing conditions were the driving force.  Included in Obamacare is a new federal risk pool - the Pre-Existing Condition Insurance Pool - that gives individuals the ability to buy a policy for the same premium as a healthy person.  As of the beginning of August, over one year after Obamacare was rammed into law and implemented, only 82,000 people had signed up for it.  For a population of over 300 million, that's incredibly low.

A look at the pesky details:

Do you remember the debates over the Affordable Care Act, aka ObamaCare? Now that repeal of the law has become a major campaign issue, it may be helpful to remember why Congress passed it in the first place.

Early in 2010, as the climactic votes neared, a parade of the legislation's defenders—from the House, Senate and Obama administration—appeared across the media. All had the same message: pre-existing conditions. They named the names of families "victimized" by companies that had refused to sell them insurance, had canceled their coverage or had refused to pay their medical bills.

The message surely resonated, but how many people have actually been affected since the law passed? The Affordable Care Act established a federally funded risk pool—the Pre-Existing Condition Insurance Plan—that allows individuals with such disqualifying conditions to buy a policy for the same premium a healthy person would pay. About 82,000 people have signed up as of July 31, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation's statehealthfacts.org.

That is not a misprint. Out of a population of more than 300 million, some 82,000 have the problem that was cited as the principal reason for spending $1.8 trillion over the next 10 years and in the process turning the entire health-care system upside down.

The risk pool surely comes as welcome relief to those who need it. A lot of them are really sick and are running up expensive medical bills. But the three-year cost is about $5 billion, as budgeted in the Affordable Care Act—a tiny fraction of the law's overall burden. Nevertheless, the federal risk pool will be closed down in 2014, when ObamaCare will begin prohibiting insurance companies from charging premiums based on the health conditions of applicants.

Smoke and mirrors and behind closed doors was how Obamacare was written.  Based on lies and distortions, Democrats bulldozed a home to fix a clogged toilet.  But that's because health care reform has nothing to do with health care.  Pre-existing conditions, while emotional, was nothing more than a lie sold to the public for one of the most destructive laws in American history.

Justin Credible is a contributing editor for Habledash.