Yes. Individual, non-group policies. This is to protect the new group policy marketplace. Right now, if you aren't eligible for group insurance, your only recourse is to buy individual coverage, which restricts pre-existing conditions, is deniable, and often very pricey, except for the few who are in perfect health, for whom it is generally marginally less expensive than a group plan. However, if everyone who can get it less expensively does, then you're left with only sick people in the group plan, so the rates will skyrocket. The reason that insurance companies make group plans is on the bet that there are a significant number of healthy people mixed in with the unhealthy ones. If they knew that everyone was unhealthy, they wouldn't be interested.

So yeah, there are a few people whose potential healthcare costs would go up: those people who would get good individual rates but who currently don't have an individual policy. But the existing policies won't get cancelled, so those people are all set.

Of course, your argument is going to be that their rates will go up to subsidize the new group. But the new group marketplace is based on competition. It's dumb for Aetna or BCBS to sell policies that lose money, and there's no reason for them to do it.


Both my wife and I have been to the doctor for the flu in recent years and been given Tamiflu. (Which really seems to help, by the way.) More to the point, if they went to their doctor for a normal checkup, they would have been that much more likely to get a flu vaccine and never have gotten it at all. And there have been recent flu vaccine shortages where it was rationed to the young, elderly, and those with immune problems: those people who are more likely to develop into pneumonia. And only a doctor can really say that a patient is immune compromised.