That statement is as good and succinct a summary of the need for the insurance industry (and the need for the insurance trade media) as any I’ve ever read.

Congratulations, Steve, on your retirement.

We desperately need people in this industry with the guts and leadership to stake out a position and argue it seriously. So much of the talk is disingenuous pablum sanitized for general consumption… your writing has cut to the chase and cleared away the BS.

I agree with Kate – you’ll be terribly missed!

Thank you for sticking to your guns, Steve! I can confidently say that you will be terribly missed.

I own a small business – an insurance agency, in fact, which is how I wound up reading this posting. I’m 45, married, and have three children. I have a high-deductible HSA compatible individual health policy which costs me about $6,000 a year.

Now that Obamacare is the law, my HSA compatible policy will no longer be offered, as the benefits aren’t “rich” enough to satisfy the IRS. I will then have to buy a comprehensive major medical policy which the Congressional Budget Office estimates will cost me between $12,000 and $15,000 per year, and the IRS will check my bank account monthly to ensure that I have purchased such a policy. I’m unlikely to be eligible for any subsidies to purchase my coverage, so that additional cost will come out of my slim profit margin.

Of course, I could simply drop my insurance coverage and pay a fine, and then wait to buy coverage until I’m sick or injured. From what I know about insurance underwriting and pricing, my health carrier won’t be in business for long if everyone did that, and I suspect many will.

This is the same scenario facing millions of small businesses in this country, those responsible for employing 70% to 80% of workers. What do you suppose will happen to the unemployment rate when they realize that they must fire some of their employees in order to remain viable? Not even this administration can expand the government workforce fast enough to absorb them all.

Again – why are we celebrating?

Tony

Is it that if anyone disagrees with this law, it automatically follows that we “must” be blindly following some pundit that you dislike? I think you might consider taking your own advice “as you mature”.

I took a quick look at your blog and you say some things I can agree with, but many are hardly “genuine facts”, but merely your opinions. I have no doubt that you are sincere and well-meaning in your opinions, but so am I. And IN MY OPINION, regardless of well-meaning you and others are, you are sadly very wrong about what will and won’t work in HCR on many issues. You see, I have no doubt that much of the law is written with “good intentions” and you describe the “good intentions” as if they are facts. But if you really understood how insurance (and government) works, you would begin to understand that there will likely be “unintended consequences” of such “good intentions”. I have my own educational and professional credentials and experience that I think qualifies me to have (my own) opinions without being lectured about where you somehow think my opinions must come from.

But if you want to jump to conclusion like that instead of taking the risk that we could all learn from some honest debate, then I might have to guess that you get your Kool-Aid from your own set of pundits.

Chuck

And I have no reason to believe that Steve does not in fact rock, but I just have not seen him at a dance. I definitely do not rock!