With the passing of the health reform bill, it has become more and more apparent that health insurance brokers will be made extinct slowly by the new health insurance exchanges that are set to be started in 4 short years. But what about the consequences of health reform on our economy?
As a health insurance broker and webmaster, I have written extensively on this topic for quite some time and am more than a little familiar with the legislation that recently passed and became law. What I expect and know will occur is identical to the situation in Maine, where due to the nature of the laws younger people just go without health insurance. Uniform pricing and a weak or lack of a strong individual mandate, make it impossible for most younger people to even come close to affording health insurance.
The pressure that this will put on health insurance companies will cause them to eventually succumb and go out of business. With the end result being a national, single payer system resembling the rest of the developed world.
In my opinion, this is the correct outcome but the cost that we will pay as a nation to get there is just too high. The economy will falter quite severly under the strain of paying for this bill and many insiders doubt it will ever recover. On the other hand, switching tomorrow to a system where everyone was on a Medicare type program regardless of age, would be the best situation economically, but perhaps the worst decision politically.