Healthcare Magazine September 2014 | Page 17

Protesters march to the Oklahoma capitol building to demonstrate their support for President Obama ’ s health care plan on September 13 , 2009 in Oklahoma City , OK
the Supreme Court upholding the constitutionality of individual mandate .
Price Discrimination The Affordable Care Act places restrictions on an insurer ’ s ability to discriminate prices . The act allows insurers to only charge limited differential prices on certain factors .
Although insurance companies can rate on age , the oldest adult in the risk pool cannot be charged more than three times as much as the youngest adult . Similarly , smokers can be charged no more than 1.5 times as much as non-smokers . The end of price discrimination will lead to healthy competition between players .
Insurer Profit Caps Medical Loss Ratio ( MLR ) is a measure of the share of premiums that an insurer actually spends on delivering care to policyholders , rather than on administrative costs , marketing , and profits . The minimum MLR mandate established by the Affordable Care Act aims to control the portion of premium
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