Compulsory insurance exploits healthy “invincibles”
April 28th, 2008 | by Brian T. Schwartz |In a previous post I’ve noted that one of the most authoritarian and paternalistic aspects of Colorado’s Senate Bill 217 (as proposed) and the 208 Commission’s recommendations is that it would make it a crime for Coloradans not to buy insurance — as politicians define it. This is known is the "individual mandate."
208 Commission Chair Bill Lindsey expressed a popular rational for this policy the Denver Business Journal :
"One of the reasons for focusing on a mandate is because it’s the only way to bring young invincibles into the system," Lindsay said, acknowledging that many uninsured people are between 19 and 34.
The Handbook of State Health Care Reform reveals the immorality of such reasoning:
A second argument for mandates is that healthy people are needed in insurance pools to make the pools financially viable. A variation on that idea is that when healthy people enter and leave the insurance system they create instability. The hidden premise behind both arguments is that insurance pools need healthy people so they can be exploited. If the healthy pay their own way (that is, are charged fair premiums) they do not increase the pools’ stability or viability. That only happens if they are overcharged. But if it is socially desirable to subsidize some people’s health insurance, why pick on the healthy? Why not spread the burden over all taxpayers?
Indeed. Surely voters would appreciate advocates of compulsory insurance being straightforward about their motives. If they want to use government to force one group of people to subsidize medical insurance for another group, they should be upfront about it, rather than hiding behind a more palatable rationale.
Maybe the "invincibles" would buy insurance if politicians didn’t make it so expensive by loading policies down with coverages many do not need. (I mentioned that here .)
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