Daily News Updates - Health Insurance News

Nominees’ Update on Health Insurance, Pt.3 – Providing ‘affordable’ health insurance to all.

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Another earmark, differentiating Mr. McCain from the ‘other’ candidate is the method he promotes to make health insurance ‘affordable’ to all Americans. Mr. McCain’s approach relies on the open market resolve of capitalism that always arrives at a settling point. He purports that this settling point for private health insurance premiums will be at a much lower rate then the current cost of health insurance premiums, both group and private, which are already a primary cause for the crises we are already in.

His catalyst to cause this is the effective elimination of current consumer protective state mandates for health insurance that exist in most of our states today. His approach here is indirect, as is the demise of employer-based health insurance. This approach would allow health insurance companies to sell policies across state lines. While is sells as providing better individual choices, we may want to consider an important lesson provided to us by the credit card industry a few years back. A number of years back, credit card issuing banks complained that various states were stifling their competitive efforts by ‘capping’ finance charge interest rates. So, in 1978, a Supreme Court ruling allowed banks to follow rate cap regulations from their own home states. Almost immediately, these issuing banks began moving their “homes” to the states with the most favorable rate caps, such as South Dakota or Delaware. Now they could charge the higher rates allowed in the states of their “new homes” for consumers that lived anywhere. (For further detail on this, please be referred to my earlier article from May, entitled “Paul Revere, but not Robin Hood”.)

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