Writes Cato's Michael Cannon:
Amid double-digit unemployment, a record $1.6 trillion federal deficit and a national debt projected to double in 10 years, U.S. Sen. Ben Nelson, D-Neb., voted to bring to the floor of the Senate a health care overhaul with so many job-killing tax increases that it’s hard to ...
A new Cato briefing paper by economist Aaron Yelowitz. Here's the summary:
One of the most interesting questions about the health care overhaul now moving through Congress is how it would affect young adults. That legislation would force most or all Americans to purchase health insurance (an "individual mandate") and would impose ...
Section 211-213 of HR 3962 basically says that insurance companies must offer coverage (guaranteed issue) and charge the same premium (community rating) to everyone regardless of their medical history. The November 8 Daily Camera (Boulder, CO) printed my brief opposition to such political controls:
Should government force you to pay more ...
John Goodman makes an excellent point about what happens when government forced insurers to charge the same price to everyone, regardless of their risk: they seek to avoid the sick and attract the healthy:
...think about everything you would like to get from an insurance company. Here are a few items ...
James C. Capretta has a fine description of what economists call the "death spiral" that results from requiring insurers to issue policies to everyone (guaranteed issue) at prices that do not reflect their health risks (community rating). It's happened in states, and it can happen nation-wide:
Insurance death spirals occur when ...
Typically profit-seeking companies try to sell products that their customers want. Not so with insurance companies when they must charge the same premium to high-risk patients as low-risk patients. Such a political control is known as "community rating." Michael Cannon explains an unintended consequence of community rating in Massachusetts:
Massachusetts long ...
"The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist."
Remember this line from The Usual Suspects? It surely applies to health care reform. As the Cato Institute's Michael Cannon has written:
To paraphrase Keyser Söze, the greatest trick that supporters of socialized medicine ever played was to ...
From the Rocky Mountain News:
A bill that would end the practice of charging women more than men for health insurance is headed to a summertime interim committee rather than a fight on the floor.
Rep. Sue Schafer, D-Wheat Ridge, said she plans to amend her House Bill 1224 and get a ...
The Aspen Times reports that a new Colorado regulation limiting risk-rating has increased insurance premiums:
As the second part of a law reforming state health insurance takes effect this month, some Aspenites with group health plans could see their premiums rise by as much as 25 percent. The bump is in ...
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 ...
