ObamaCare (Not About the Bakken): Children-Only Health Insurance

This site is devoted to the Bakken. I have fond memories of the state I call home, and I am inappropriately exuberant over the activity in the Williston Basin.

I appreciate those who stop by to see what's going on in the Bakken and every morning the first thing I do is check the site to see what readers are seeing as the lead story. I hope it will be a positive story on the oil industry in western North Dakota.

But I usually rant at least once a day (occasionally more often) about some non-Bakken topic. I assume most of my readers do not appreciate such posts on a site that bills itself as "all Bakken all the time." But I do my best to minimize the number of such posts and readers can be assured that before the day is over there will be not less than three new Bakken posts. (By the way, I spend a lot of time updating old posts; what you see posted as the lead stories each day is about ten percent of what I post behind the scenes. This site has an incredible amount of archived information, most of it linked on the sidebar at the right. The site is optimized for the Firefox browser and if you know how to use the two Firefox browser "search" options, you can generally find what you are looking for if it concerns the Bakken and has relevancy to more than just one or two readers.)

My rant for the day comes from the Los Angeles Times website: health insurers in California will stop selling child-only health policies starting tomorrow (Thursday, September 23, 2010) because the insurers fear runaway costs.

Major health insurance companies in California and other states have decided to stop selling policies for children rather than comply with a new federal healthcare law that bars them from rejecting youngsters with preexisting medical conditions.

Anthem Blue Cross, Aetna Inc. and others will halt new child-only policies in California, Illinois, Florida, Connecticut and elsewhere as early as Thursday when provisions of the nation's new healthcare law take effect, including a requirement that insurers cover children under age 19 regardless of their health histories.

This was predictable. I was just surprised that health insurers would be so audacious to take such action with such clarity and transparency.

Except for reproductive issues and mental health care issues, men and women between the ages of fourteen years of age and fifty-five years of age have  minimal health care costs. For young families, their health care costs revolve around their infants and young children, which require multiple well-baby and well-child visits during the first six years of life, and that's just for healthy children and preventive medicine care. In addition, adults are generally covered for medical care stemming from two major health risks: car accidents (through their automobile insurance) and workplace injuries (through OSHA regulations and workmen's compensation).

Insurers say they cannot afford the terms of the new health care program and the bill did not provide a back-up plan, or Plan B as soccer moms would call it.

And so it goes. Sad.But.Predictable.

[Update: one day after posting the above, the Washington Examiner goes into greater detail on just how bad ObamaCare is.]