Daily News Updates - Health Insurance News

What’s all this fighting about?, Pt.9 – Mandatory health insurance may be mandatory.

Previous…

Mandatory universal makes good sense because the private insurance industry will need to create those large risk-sharing pools, like the employer-based health insurance plans always have. They can’t have the young and health simply ‘opt-out’ and still maintain profit margin (which they must do). Thus far Mr. O, for different reasons has chosen not to adopt Hillary’s premier feature of requiring everyone to acquire health insurance.

When the forces engage, Mr. O may find (will find) that survival of his health insurance proposal depends on cooperation in congress. Perhaps this is a remedy. Mandating health insurance for everyone is good with industry and it was good with Hillary. Either way, it’s going to be a fight in Congress with concessions required on both sides.

The next concern in Ms. Pipes’ article is about the increased cost of health insurance driving (or drawing) everyone over to the cheaper public health insurance plans. Interestingly, that was a prime concern in Massachusetts model not even a year ago. When the results finally came in they found: Concerning the issue of the mass exodus away from conventional health insurance causing the industries to collapse and ruin our economy -- The Urban Institute has conducted studies on the matter. They have been posted in the journal Health affairs.

What has been found is “no evidence that residents were dropping private health coverage“ in order to jump on the opportunity of the new state-subsidized plans. Further, it is noted that there is no indication that “employers viewed the availability of new public programs as a reason to eliminate” current employee health insurance benefits.

Continued…