Study: Association Health Plans will hurt access to insurance

Interesting Boston Globe Article about a Harvard study which concludes that the new "Association health plans" bill being pushed through Congress will result in LESS access to health insurance, because it will allow group insurers for small businesses to exclude patients with preexisting conditions (ie, those who need it the most).

Nancy Turnbull, a professor at Harvard School of Public Health who co-wrote the study, said the bill would unintentionally hurt employees' access to healthcare because association health plans would keep costs lower by signing up people who are healthy and thus have fewer medical expenses. Those with preexisting medical conditions could be excluded, Turnbull said, leaving them in traditional small-group plans with skyrocketing rates.

She said that would undermine a basic tenet of insurance: Large groups of people help absorb the expense of higher-cost members.

''We have a carefully structured and regulated system for small-group health insurance that's designed to broadly spread costs and prevent insurers from damaging practices such as cherry-picking," said Turnbull, a former official in the state Division of Insurance who helped craft some of the existing regulations.

This is, of course, what insurers have been hoping for ever since the 1990s: a way to override HIPAA and stop insuring sick people when they switch jobs.