Daily News Updates - Health Insurance News

Fla. Health Insurance Flops Fast, Pt.1 – Need more hype for the ‘Lose/Lose’ plan.

Florida’s dazzling new health insurance concept is starting to fade fast as the Washington-based Center for Budget and Policy Priorities examines it closely. The Tampa Tribune has just posted an article on their http://www2.tbo.com/ explaining the situation. The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities goes so far as to label the new plan a ‘Lose/Lose’ situation where neither side, buyer nor seller want to participate. The plan, which is slated to go live in January of 2009, was intended to resolve Florida’s deplorable health insurance condition. The theory was ‘if it’s cheap enough, they’ll buy it’. Governor Crist, who championed the project touted it flamboyantly as the be’s-all, end-all for Florida’s 3.8 million under 65 old adults without health insurance. Crist’s own comment was "Common sense tells me that if its $150 a month instead of $700 a month a lot more of our fellow Floridians will be to afford it and that’s a good thing."

At $150 a month, after a 6-month dry period of having had no health insurance, people could buy enrollment and pick their choices of coverage like from a restaurant menu. They would only have to buy what they needed. Sound’s like a great concept. For $150 you can order the chopped liver, sides are extra. In order to sanction this, however, the state had to waive their consumer protective mandates and allow for ‘anything goes’. This is very similar to the result expected from what John McCain is proposing with his ‘selling across state lines’ proposal. The effect is to lower prices and foster competition by circumventing each state’s consumer-protection mandates on health insurance carriers.

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