On the Third Hand: P-rays

But I bite my tongue and keep silent.

The gulf between the people who are seeing the world colored by P-rays and the world that healthy, normal people see is too great. Of course, once the exchanges really start up, and really start enrolling people in the qualified health plans — or the Republicans succeed at killing the exchanges dead — the P-ray effect will vanish.

We'll go from a Dante-esque world of wonders and horrors to the usual world in which plenty goes wrong, some things go right, most people muddle through, and insurance professionals try to figure out how to cut through all of the institutional nonsense and solve problems.

The exchange plans — or the brutal death of the exchange plans — will increase competition in some markets, make dominant players more dominant in others, and make the variations between the health market rules in effect in different states smaller but more exasperating than they were before. In the reddest of the red states, Republicans will suddenly be giving a large block of poor, sick people who have avoided voting a huge incentive to vote — to protect the federally-run programs that supply their health insurance, or to punish the officials who failed to take the Medicaid expansion money while the getting was good.

On the one hand, the fading of the P-ray effect will probably make the world a little less colorful for anyone involved in health insurance who has found that, for the first time in their lives, friends and relatives are interested in what they do at work.

On the other hand, once the P-rays fade, insurance professionals may find they have an urgent, difficult-to-satisfy need to figure out how to get past those infernal exchange contact centers.

On the third hand, whatever happens, confusion seems likely to increase. That bodes well for insurance professionals.

For more from Allison Bell, see:

• 5 ways industry trailblazers are preparing for PPACA
• If not LTCI, then what?
• PPACA haunts entertainment industry