In Alabama 95% of insurance is done by one company. Something fishy there.
In every state the insurance policies get fatter and fatter every year, making it less and less likely anybody knows what they are buying, if indeed they ever did.
The proposed rules about not dropping coverage and not excluding pre-existing conditions is good. These are not exotic features, but fairly standard if you sign up during your job’s “open application” window and stay employed throughout your illness. It’s those two exceptions that cause personal ruin.
I think standardized policies, and shorter ones at that, should be the norm, mandatory offerings for all companies. Just as auto insurers in many states have state-defined minimum packages.
I’d put a tax on the amount of pages of fine print. Even a mere dollar a pound ought to discourage the practice.
I think multi-part payment structures should be eliminated. Administrative policy start up charges, surcharges for adding employees between “open” windows, etc.
And I think there ought to be more comparable “key numbers”. Like the APR on loans, there should be a visible declaration of the policy’s cost divided by actuarial risk.
Well there are a lot of things we can do around the edges but in the end we are using a lot of band aids to stop a gunshot wound. If the public option fails then lets hope the midwestern senators will support the co-op plan (co-ops are more common in the midwest so maybe they’ll be OK with it).
We can start by having increases in the cost of premiums evenly spread across all members of the company’s plans.
There is no good fucking reason my IFP premium goes up 30% per year and the group premium goes up by 3%. I am tired of subsidizing the healthcare of those who elect to work for a large, faceless corporation.
There is a very good reason.There is no public option and no bargainning power in your position.They can do whatever they want.
We do not have a health care system. We have an insurance care system. They are quite healthy, thanks to you .
Let insurance companies compete across state lines. More competition certainly couldn’t hurt. I don’t know how easy this would be since every state has its own set of rules.
Also, why not let insurance companies offer plans that only cover catastrophic events instead of covering basic preventative care. I think if the government did not mandate so much we would have a lot more choices in the type of plan we could purchase…much like auto insurance.
Oh, and we have to get rid of linking health insurance to employment.
Competing across state lines would just achieve mergers and acquisitions. Insurance companies would get more powerful . If there is no public option, they win.
We can go to a completely government run system, where the only place for the insurance companies is around the edges.
With 90% of the insurance companies going out of business, those that wanted to survive would have to offer darn good service, at reasonable rates.
I don’t see how they can be much more powerful. Certain states have only one or two companies to choose from. How would increaing competition and breaking up any monopolies cause any one company to get more powerful (relative to other companies)?
Money is power. They could get bigger and bigger. If we don’t get them now, it may be too late.
Competition is something corporations fight. It is good for consumers. They are not interested in the consumer. They want to keep their profits high. They will fight any measure that does not make them more powerful.
Wellpoint has 71 percent of the insurance in Maine. They would not go into another state to get competitive but to buy up companies until they controlled that state too.
!. Letting them compete across state lines only means that, once the smaller companies have been absorbed, the country will be divided into territories.
2.
On second thought, screw reasons 2 through 100. The bastards have Congress in their pocket, and a large part of the populace are sheeple that are easily manipulated by multimillion dollar ad campaigns run by those who know that most find it easier to scream and shout than think.
If we don’t get them now? Wow…you are determined to destroy the industry. No question that companies detest competition and want to keep their profits high. This is where government is useful…ensuring competition as opposed to taking over the market. If Walmart can’t completely take over and charge whatever they want then what makes you think an insurance company would be able to behave any differently?
Do you really think people have not thought about the consequences of government involvement in health insurance? There are two sides to this issue and, just because the “sheeple” did not take YOUR side is not reason enough to assume they have given no thought to this issue. I find it amusing that the “sheeple” are not being manipulated by all the special interests such as big Pharma, AARP, AMA, etc.
It is curious that the states don’t all have more competitors within their borders now, isn’t it? It’s almost as if there were some sort of natural force in the industry which favors the formation of monopolies. If that’s the case, there’s no reason to expect that force to go away just because ‘competition’ is shifted to a national scale. We’ll just and up with two or three major players across the whole of the country.
Could it be the very natural force of government? It seems to me that if health insurance could be untethered from employment then individuals could decide as opposed to employers. Couldn’t hurt as far as competition is concerned.
Walmart did. They were so powerful they forced their suppliers to move production to China. They have amassed a fortune of enormous proportions in a couple decades. They have political influence on a new level unheard of in the past. They control the suppliers. That is how they got by. Target had to emulate them to stay in business. Who knows how much in cahoots they are?
Yet they are still the leader in low prices. They are giving the CONSUMER what they want and it is the suppliers that have to figure out how to keep prices low. But this is my point…if Walmart completely took over then they could charge whatever they want for their products.
Umm…people being able to take their business elsewhere. The current system does not allow this. Compassion from a company is only PR and this only works if you have the ability to tell the company “Fuck you…I’ll go elsewhere for my insurance”
How so? States typically contain millions of consumers apiece. What about them makes them too small to support real competition?
Is there any evidence that the nation as a whole is large enough to support the competition you claim will come to exist?
