So smoking is a condition?

[VaticanAssassin]

Then your real complaint is that you live in a representative democracy.


You further seem to be advocating a top-down form of governance, with DC dictating how things are done in ottumwa. Do you feel the same way about states that administer Medicare/Medicaid?

Are you suggesting it is fine for unelected state boards to dictate that smoking is a pre existing condition?

When I had to read that for work (I had to read the whole goddamn thing and explain it to people because there are tax liabilities associated with certain parts) what I found the most funny was that like smoking, tanning beds were associated with a higher premium!

SUCK IT TANNERS! I have said for years that your habit is JUST AS BAD as mine!! You walk around toting skin cancer like it's a goddamn badge of honor. Finally you can feel the pain of the rest of us who love cancer-causing pasttimes!

Also who the fuck is stupid enough to tell their insurance agent they smoke? They can't call you on it.

Life carriers will typically let you slide. But if a claim comes in for someone who was paying premium based on a non smoker rate and he dies of lung cancer, they have the right to a autopsy and to deny benefits.

I suspect if you are paying non smoker medical rates and go in for Lung cancer the same would apply.

 

[neci]

i set a quit date.

 

[Ishmael]

So if insurance companies can not charge a higher rate for smokers, are non smokers fine with paying a higher rate to cover their additional costs?

I have smoked for years but recently quit (except when I drink, golf, or gamble). It was my stupid decision to smoke and understood my premiums from health to life would be higher and agreed they should be.

Does anyone agree with this?

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/345153/smoking-preexisting-condition-kevin-d-williamson

The District of Columbia’s Obamacare czars — the board that sets rules for the phony insurance marketplace, or “exchange,” that the law creates — have decided that henceforth insurers shall be forbidden by law to charge smokers higher rates than non-smokers. Smoking, as it turns out, “is a preexisting medical condition,” according to Dr. Mohammad Akhter, the chairman of the D.C. Health Exchange Board. Two liberal states, California and Connecticut, have decided likewise, while Colorado and Alaska have rejected the idea.


As expected, the definition of “preexisting condition” is proving infinitely malleable, with behaviors born again as conditions. If smoking is a condition, then drug addiction is a condition, self-mutilation is a condition, a penchant for BASE jumping is a condition, juggling ampules of penicillin-resistant syphilis — practically anything qualifies as a condition under such a plastic understanding.
There are many ways to implement a bad idea. For instance, Congress might have passed a law requiring that all U.S. insurance companies no longer charge smokers more for their coverage. The state of Connecticut might have passed a similar law. New York City might have passed that law. But in each case, voters who saw that stupidity for what it is would have somebody to vote against. Obamacare eliminates the option for democratic response. Instead, it creates a body of political appointees immune from being held accountable at the ballot box. And who are those appointees? In the case of D.C., you will find few surprises: The SEIU has a man on the board, along with a lot of time-serving political types, a fellow from the Brookings Institution, a lobbyist, etc. Don’t like their boneheaded decisions? Too bad.

There will be thousands and thousands of decisions like this in the coming years, and voters will have very little recourse against them. That is part of the genius of bundling the welfare state with the regulatory state: Whether you are a Democrat who basically likes Obamacare and wants to revisit a few of its flaws or a Republican committed to tearing it up root and branch, you have basically the same hurdle to clear. It might be easier to sell the idea of revision to the general public, but the structural legislative barrier is the same as if you were repealing the law wholesale. The question of ending “discrimination” against smokers is so many levels removed from democratic accountability that even those who are strongly opposed to the idea will probably have no effect. To get to the board, you basically have to fire the mayor, which is no small thing in a corrupt and backward place like our nation’s capital.

Obamacare was sold as a way to help poor people and sick people get health insurance, but, as the D.C. decision shows, the actual intent of the law is the abolition of health insurance. The notion of insuring a preexisting condition is an oxymoron; insurance is by nature concerned with that which may happen in the future rather than with that which already has happened. In very large groups, human health outcomes are predictable with a fair degree of precision: Given 10 million people, actuaries can make pretty accurate predictions about how many people are going to get lung cancer and how many are going to be in car accidents. Some factors are relevant to some conditions: Being 17 years old and getting in a car accident, for example, or smoking and heart disease, emphysema, cancer, etc. Insurance, which places a price on calculated risks, will take some of those factors into account. But you cannot in any meaningful sense insure somebody against cancer when they already have cancer.

Obamacare is designed to destroy the insurance market. Markets do not function without prices, and Obamacare ensures that prices will not be allowed to emerge. There is a medical price associated with smoking, but the District of Columbia has decided to suppress that price by law. Pretending that smoking has no relationship with health-care costs does not make it so — it is only a way to push costs around in a way that is agreeable to the likes of Barack Obama, converting a system that prices risk into a system of entitlements.

One of the many "laws of unintended consequences" that are, and will continue, to raise their head over that abortion of legislation.

Ishmael

 

[JohnnySavage]

Are you suggesting it is fine for unelected state boards to dictate that smoking is a pre existing condition?



...

Yes. That's how we do things here in the United States.

Laws are passed by the elected representatives of the citizens. The laws lay out the structure and the general framework of the will of the citizens, as expressed through their elected representatives.

The laws are then implemented by regulations. The regulations are written by functionaries, then approved by appointed heads or boards of whatever body is responsible for the regulations.

As one of the very few conservatives here, I'm happy that the regulations and implementation of any law are pushed down as close to the people as possible. If you want Congress voting on every little minutia of every regulation implementing a law, you're going to need a much bigger Congress.


No charge for the Civics lesson.

 

[WeedSmoke420]

shit, a pack of ciggerattes here going for 12.00!!!

is like, wtf!

i remember when i first started they were $2.25

 

[Colonel Hogan]

So if insurance companies can not charge a higher rate for smokers, are non smokers fine with paying a higher rate to cover their additional costs?

I have smoked for years but recently quit (except when I drink, golf, or gamble). It was my stupid decision to smoke and understood my premiums from health to life would be higher and agreed they should be

.

No. I think the panels should be elected officials.

I also think the law gives insurance companies the right to charge higher rates to smokers. States taking that right away under an interpretation of the pre ex is ridiculous. The pre ex language needs to be cleaned up.

The real point:

There are many ways to implement a bad idea. For instance, Congress might have passed a law requiring that all U.S. insurance companies no longer charge smokers more for their coverage. The state of Connecticut might have passed a similar law. New York City might have passed that law. But in each case, voters who saw that stupidity for what it is would have somebody to vote against. Obamacare eliminates the option for democratic response. Instead, it creates a body of political appointees immune from being held accountable at the ballot box.

Are you suggesting it is fine for unelected state boards to dictate that smoking is a pre existing condition?

Are you suggesting it is fine for elected state boards to dictate that smoking is a pre-existing condition simply by virtue of the fact that they are elected? How about if the elected boards, in their infinite wisdom, left the issue completely up to the insurers? Then you would be in the position of appearing to endorse the notion (which the article seemed to ridicule) that any activity of risk (drug addiction, BASE jumping, etc.) is a condition for which insurers may charge a premium or, even more significantly, not cover at all.

It is admirable that you are willing to accept some measure of financial responsibility for your decision to smoke. But your hypothetical question to us non-smokers as to whether we would be willing to pay a higher premium rate to subsidize your bad habit betrays your ignorance of the comparatively free ride you've long been getting. The answer to your question is that we tobacco-free co-insureds have been paying the higher rate all along.

And no one ever asked us if we were willing to absorb that cost. It was imposed upon us as a simple matter of being a part of that 10 million person risk pool the article spoke of whose predictable actuarial costs are so easily determined.

That pool made no distinction between smokers and non-smokers (as has historically been the case up until fairly recently). The result was that healthy people subsidized the health care costs of the sick and injured regardless of the contributing factors of luck, caution, and/or recklessness. That, of course, is the very core of insurance itself. It is the very premise of that particular "free-market."

But preexisting medical conditions are only a fraction of the broader market "condition" known as insurability. If you have gone from job to job with little or no break in employment, you have enjoyed the charmed existence of being a member of an employer health plan of sufficient size that few if any lifestyle penalties were imposed upon you. Portability of coverage for preexisting conditions from one employer to the next was probably a guaranteed provision of state insurance laws.

If you were faced with even a short period of unemployment, you were likely exposed to the "opportunity" of a COBRA health plan whose principle distinguishing feature was probably a premium two or three times the cost of your prior coverage in exchange for even less benefits than you had only weeks or days before.

If you chose to run the risk of going without insurance, as tens of thousands of families have done and are doing currently through the latest recession and alleged recovery, you found yourself every bit as uninsurable as an octogenarian with stage four cancer. They (and perhaps you) may not have realized that allowing their health insurance coverage to lapse for nothing more innocuous than non-payment of premiums effectively precluded them from obtaining health insurance coverage on the "open market" even after their financial circumstances may have improved.

Now if your free market libertarianism is built upon an impenetrable foundation of assurance that statistical consequences, no matter how dire, are immune from the characterization of being just or unjust, there is nothing about an insurance company exercising its free market "right" to exploit such circumstances for its profit that would likely disturb you. Nor would I expect you to lose much sleep over how an uninsured, non-indigent cancer victim would receive healthcare without bankrupting his or her survivors.

Nonetheless, there is no more disingenuous statement in the National Review article than this: "Obamacare was sold as a way to help poor people and sick people get health insurance, but, as the D.C. decision shows, the actual intent of the law is the abolition of health insurance."

No evidence is given as to why or how the entire insurance industry would have collected and stored the hostility necessary to have provoked such an attack or how the government's interest in affecting such an act of aggression would be best served by an "individual mandate" to the consumer to buy a qualifying insurance product (at virtually any price) rather than imposing a price ceiling on the insurance product being offered. If the goal is to destroy the insurance industry, then the individual mandate on the consumer is the most "bass ackwards" way to go about it.

Indeed, the one enduring (and truthful) complaint as the implementation of Obamacare approaches, is that individuals and the businesses that employ them are already seeing a meteoric rise in health insurance premiums due to the mandated coverage of preexisting conditions -- even those legitimate conditions of active, in vivo disease rather than an expansive definition including subjectively risky behaviors.

The true goal of Obamacare is to extend Medicare-like coverage to all Americans. But as Medicare and Medicaid have proven, the financial challenge in removing coverage obstacles like preexisting conditions, annual and lifetime benefit limitations may be simply unsustainable.

In any event, it certainly won't be solved by the feckless provision of elected regulatory boards.

 

[CandiCame]

shit, a pack of ciggerattes here going for 12.00!!!

is like, wtf!

i remember when i first started they were $2.25

A PACK!? WTF are you smoking? I pay like $5 for a cartoon of cheap ass fuckers like GTs or something. I don't care about the brand, I just want the nicotine.

 

[CandiCame]

Are you suggesting it is fine for unelected state boards to dictate that smoking is a pre existing condition?



Life carriers will typically let you slide. But if a claim comes in for someone who was paying premium based on a non smoker rate and he dies of lung cancer, they have the right to a autopsy and to deny benefits.

I suspect if you are paying non smoker medical rates and go in for Lung cancer the same would apply.

I live in coal country. Our air is black sometimes. Everyone gets lung cancer.