Why are there limited enrollment periods for Medicare supplement plans or ACA (Obamacare) plans? There are no limits on when I can choose or change my auto or home insurance plans. Why should health care be different?
It's to keep people from leaving their health insurance without paying for it after going to the doctor and getting patched up.
That's not how it works. If you leave the insurance company after you are treated, the insurer already paid for your care.
Insurance sales get a little thin after the Christmas trees appear in Lowes. This policy causes people to think about buying some kind of insurance in the Christmas buying season.
Your policy is cancelled and you have no benefits from that point on. But none of that has anything to do with the enrollment period.
The enrollment period was put in place exactly because they didn't want people ditching their plans when they're healthy and then getting a new one only when they got sick/injured/etc.
I don't think anyone on Medicare wants to go through the trouble of constantly jumping in and out of supplemental plans.
My thread mentioned both. I understand the courts have thrown out the financial penalties for not signing up for the ACA, so those might have been more of a factor than the restricted enrollment period. In any case, say you are a young, healthy person who aged out of their parent's plan and want to enroll in ACA but can't because it's the wrong time of the year. What's the point of that? I've seen a TV commercial where Kaiser Permanente says Medicare members can sign with them at any time because of their five-star quality rating, So for Medicare, at least, the enrollment restriction is a farce. I suspect the insurance industry lobbied for the restriction so they could focus their advertising on a shorter time period or limit the opportunities for seniors to drop out of poorly-run plans.
The idea was that people cannot buy insurance only when they have an operation coming up. But in the many many shortsided rules of Obamacare by having everyone enroll at the same time the burden on insurance companies processing hundreds of milliions of enrollments and changes all within a couple months has added $2 billion dollars a year to expenses. Expenses passed on in premiums. Thank you Obama. I understand the idea of not allowing people to buy insurance just because they have an operation coming up but at the very minimum they could have had two open enrollments, December each year and how about the individuals birthday month. That would reduce a tremendous financial burden on insurance companies and help lower rates. A typical liberal response would be "who cares about insurance companies" well dear liberal you should because that extra cost Obama gifted them is paid by YOU.
