Monday, January 5th, 2009
Michael Cannon writes in the Washington Times that do avoid disastrous health care reform, we must oppose:
Government-run health care for the middle class (which Obama has proposed)
mandatory insurance
insurance price controls (e.g., community rating)
On point 1, Cannon writes:
Medicare is an unwise model for reform. When private health plans and providers try ...
Posted in Medicaid/Medicare/SCHIP, PPC | No Comments »
Wednesday, December 10th, 2008
Linda Gorman has an excellent article on how state-level insurance controls make insurance prohibitively expensive:
Providing health insurance for everyone who wants it doesn’t have to come with a high price tag. It doesn’t have to come with increased government control of your medical decisions, or less personal choice when it ...
Posted in Colorado, regulation | No Comments »
Tuesday, November 25th, 2008
[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="152" caption="Senator Max Baucus"][/caption]
Senator Max Baucus's proposal has all the ingredients for failure and eroding our freedom: mandatory insurance, employer mandate, and expansion of SCHIP. Michael Tanner at Cato writes:
You may be perfectly satisfied with the insurance you have today, but that wouldn’t matter. If the bureaucrats ...
Posted in Medicaid/Medicare/SCHIP, mandatory insurance, regulation | No Comments »
Friday, November 7th, 2008
There are several ways to respond to people who advocate socialized medicine or single-payer health care in the United States. You can start at fundamentals by point out that health care is not a right, and that governmnt-controlled health care violates the rights of physicians and patients. You can point out ...
Posted in PPC, Policy - National, regulation, single payer | No Comments »
Monday, October 27th, 2008
From Cato's Michael Tanner:
Q: Will I be able to keep the insurance coverage I have now?
A: Not necessarily. On the stump and in commercials, Senator Obama says that his plan is based on allowing you to "keep your current coverage." But what he is not telling you is that he ...
Posted in regulation | No Comments »
Thursday, October 9th, 2008
Michael Cannon has written an excellent critique of an Obama campaign ad on health care. Here's a part on denying care:
Obama encourages insurers to deny coverage. If the average 18-year-old makes $1,000 in claims per year, the average 55-year-old makes $20,000 in claims, and each pays a premium of $12,000, whom will insurance ...
Posted in PPC, regulation | No Comments »
Thursday, August 28th, 2008
Grace-Marie Turner makes a good case for it in yesterday's Wall Street Journal:
Much to our surprise, the Census Bureau reported yesterday that the number of people in the U.S. with health insurance actually increased by 3.6 million last year. That's the good news. The bad news is that nearly three ...
Posted in regulation | No Comments »
Tuesday, July 29th, 2008
Summary: Community rating (CR) forbids insurance companies from risk-rating their premiums. Say someone supports this because it supposedly helps make insurance more affordable and accessible to higher-risk consumers. You could counter this with empirical evidence that it's not effective. But more effective is to expose CR as a stealth method to force ...
Posted in regulation | No Comments »
Monday, June 23rd, 2008
From a recent report by Americas Health Insurance Plans and Milliman, Inc.:
Guarantee[d] issue requires insurers to sell an individual health insurance policy without regard to a person’s health and community rating requires that all consumers pay the same or similar premiums without regard to age or gender. According to the ...
Posted in regulation | No Comments »
