Looking for a place where Obamacare doesn't exist? Try moving to the U.S. Territories, where the Obama administration just provided a pretty big waiver from the law's major coverage provisions.If I am a healthcare entrepreneur, I am headed to Puerto Rico right now, to set up a "tourist healthcare" operation there.
The Affordable Care Act's design dealt a pretty big problem to the territories. It required insurers there to comply with the law's major market reforms — guaranteed coverage, mandated benefits, limits on profits, etc. — without requiring residents to get coverage or providing subsidies to help them afford coverage. The territories — Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, American Samoa, Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands — have been warning for years that would destroy their insurance markets. The individual mandate and the subsidies are the major ways the ACA tries to bring healthy people into the individual insurance market to balance out sick patients who can no longer be denied coverage.
That was until Wednesday, when the Obama administration told the territories that the coverage requirements actually don't apply to them. The exemption was posted on a Health and Human Services Web site on Thursday.
I have discussed in the EPJ Daily Alert why I consider Puerto Rico a major investment opportunity in spite of the PR municipal bond problems. This Obamacare exemption is icing on the cake. The billionaire hedge fund operator John Paulson has stated he plans to invest $2 billion in the territory and Peter Schiff is going to make PR his base for himself and his money management operations.
-RW
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