Daily News Updates - Health Insurance News

American Health insurance System 201, Pt.2 – Who would want a problematic status quo?

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So, what is the status quo of our health insurance system? More specifically, what are the prime obstacles, obscured to us, that block the crux of meaningful and effective health insurance system change? What they are not, are the over-simplified headlines of hope. Do we have the personal resolve to demand that acceptable health insurance reform will actually be accomplished? Well here are some of those obstacles of weight that need to be considered:

To start with, our current health insurance system is not currently regulated under one roof. Each of the 50 states are individual regulators. Although most are responsible enough to maintain consumer protection mandates, some have none. As to agreeing to what is the ‘best’ method for a health insurance system, they all seem to agree that each one’s own is it. Unfortunately, that leaves us 50 different ones to choose from with no arbitrator. It would literally take ‘an act of Congress’ to change the ‘McCarren Act’ which affected this method back in the 1940’s. We would be asking our legislators to “go against the grain of big-money politics”. Then, we would still have to override the individual powers of the states. This could only be achieved with bi-partisan unity (almost an oxymoron these days).

Against the grain to the health insurance industry is when they’re asked to trash their business model of “make[ing] money in their insurance operations by not paying claims (i.e., charging more in premiums than they have to pay out and simply not insuring people who have had are likely to have claims),” as phrased my Mr. Gallington. How hard can they ‘push back?’ They seem to have tentacles everywhere and have tens-of trillions of dollars in muscle. From investments in capital markets to institutional investments to stocks to bonds to real estate…you name it. They’re big players. These are such large enterprises, that the states are only able to regulate then by a ‘hodgepodge’ set of rules.

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