Asheville Citizen-Times

By: Mark Barrett

Federal spending to help lower- and middle-income wage earners buy health insurance would drop dramatically in North Carolina under the health care law winning approval in the U.S. House last week.

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But the fact that the risk pool’s books balanced doesn’t mean that those who were covered could balance their household budgets, said Adam Searing, a former advocate for health care access in North Carolina. Searing is now a professor at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy.

The plan paid out a maximum benefit of $1 million over the lifetime of those covered and did not cover pre-existing conditions for the first 12 months someone was covered, Searing said. Some of those covered “could blow through a lifetime (benefit) cap in a year or two years.”

“Probably some of the hardest conversations I ever had with people who needed health insurance … (were) to explain to them that the high-risk pool was too expensive and it wasn’t going to solve their problems,” he said.

Establishing the pool was a positive step, but touting high-risk pools as a way to cover many people or dramatically lower health insurance costs for others is “a false hope,” Searing said. “It helped a few people, but it was never the right answer.”

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