Instead of more political meddling in insurance markets like guaranteed issue and community rating, the following free-market-oriented reforms would help alleviate the problems with pre-existing conditions. From John Goodman at the Health Affairs Blog:
Encourage Portable Insurance.
Allow Special Health Savings Accounts for the Chronically Ill.
Allow Special Needs Health Insurance.
Allow Health ...
Sheldon Richman makes the case in The Freeman:
Opponents of (more) government control of health care and health insurance are breathing a sigh of relief after Tuesday’s upset senatorial election in Massachusetts. But now that the celebrations are subsiding, I feel compelled to warn that the most perilous days may lie ...
Obama Care - more uninsured, higher premiums, writes economist Martin Feldstein in the Washington Post:
A key feature of the House and Senate health bills would prevent insurance companies from denying coverage to anyone with preexisting conditions. The new coverage would start immediately, and the premium could not reflect the individual's ...
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 ...
"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 ...
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 ...
"The capitalists ... will work on the preparation of their own suicide." -- Vladimir Lenin*
Or as the Wall Street Journal describes:
America's Health Insurance Plans, the industry trade group, recently said its members would accept all comers regardless of health status or previous illness -- i.e., guaranteed issue -- but only ...
Will Obama's proposal for a nation-wide mandate for guaranteed issue insurance decimate insurance companies to the point that government will have to "save the day" with a single-payer monopoly that Obama really wants? Consider this from the Associated Press:
Barack Obama's campaign promise should prove irresistible to the millions of uninsured: ...
