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Comment by dangrossman | Hacker News Reader

You have a low rate in the first place because they've decided there's a low chance they'll have to pay out a lot of money for you. Most likely, your premium is all or nearly all profit.

Better to keep your profitable premiums than to lose you to a cheaper state exchange. It'd only make sense to force you into the newer rate immediately if you had no other option -- but the exchanges are all about giving you more options.

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It'll be interesting to see how this plays out. I imagine that a big percentage (maybe majority / plurality) of people jumping into the insurance markets are going to be people who otherwise couldn't get insurance (pre-existing conditions, whatever--high-cost clients, essentially). The only way to balance the books is to make the healthy people pay more. I expect the young-and-healthy category to pay even more than the 15-50% extra in the article. It's going to be ugly, from a dollar perspective.

About 17% of the US workforce is officially "underemployed"; that's a very large number. I would think a large chunk of that are young, healthy people who work one or more part-time jobs without benefits. They're to be forced into the health insurance marketplace as well, with government assistance if they can't afford it -- essentially, there will be a tax dollar transfer to insurers that could absorb much of the extra cost of also insuring people with pre-existing conditions. It really is hard to predict how it will play out.

The insurance companies selling through the exchange are the same insurance companies who'd be "losing you", so I don't think that's it. Since businesses aren't subject to being excluded for pre-existing conditions, group plans already have that risk factor built into their pricing. Difference being they discriminate more based on age (55-65 year olds pay 4-5X what a 25 year old pays) than they will be allowed to in January (I think the cap is 3x).

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