Pennsylvania’s subsidized health insurance for low-income working people will likely end next month, officials on Gov.-elect Tom Corbett’s transition team said Tuesday, leaving more than 40,000 people with less palatable options and dashing the hopes of more than 400,000 on the waiting list. Easy To Insure ME has the answers
“AdultBasic is not sustainable,” said Kevin Harley, a spokesman for the transition, referring to the insurance program that began eight years ago under Gov. Tom Ridge, a Republican, and was expanded by outgoing Gov. Rendell, a Democrat.
Staff for the incoming and outgoing governors traded accusations Tuesday about who was responsible for the program’s demise, but both agreed that the money – a combination of tobacco-settlement revenues and donations from the state’s four Blue Cross plans – would run out around Feb. 28 and that no good alternative was in place.
“There is no apparent source of funds,” said David F. Simon, chairman of the transition team for insurance matters and chief legal counsel of Jefferson Health System.
To provide “as soft a landing as possible,” Simon said, the team had negotiated an agreement with the Blue Cross companies to waive their normal restriction on people with preexisting conditions who move from adultBasic to the Blues’ current Special Care plans for low-income people.
Those plans cost several times as much as adultBasic and provide far fewer benefits – a maximum of four doctor’s office visits a year for most issues, including both primary care and specialists, for example.
“Special care is horrible insurance,” said Gene Bishop, an internal medicine doctor at Pennsylvania Hospital and a physician consultant to the Pennsylvania Health Law Project, one of several advocacy groups that condemned the move.
“When I was in practice and I first saw someone with that insurance, I thought they were mistaken. Who would sell someone insurance that you can only go four times a year?” said Bishop. A doctor should see someone with diabetes at least that often, she said, just to meet medical guidelines for managing the person’s condition, not counting anything else that might happen, such as contracting the flu.
Kathy Dabanian, a 52-year-old house cleaner who lives in Sellersville, Bucks County, has been enrolled in adultBasic almost since the beginning, when doctors at Doylestown Hospital suspected she had Lyme disease.
