Daily News Updates - Health Insurance News

Speaking Up On McCain’s Plan, Pt.3 – Ooooh Baby, Baby, It’s A Wild World.

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Another ramification is that consumers can now (and will have to) shop in the open market for health insurance. In law they call it ‘caveat emptor’ – let the buyer beware. When selecting health insurance strange to you, read that fine print. Bring your calculator and double-check that list. Watch out for exclusions and waiting periods. Know the different health insurance terms: prophylaxis, ‘new’ techniques’, underwriting, amount allowed, re-satisfying, rescission, non-participating and pre-determination to name a few. You may wish to go through and just learn them all. Or, maybe you feel lucky (Did he just fire 5 rounds or 6?).

Fostering fierce competition can be good or bad. But, in any case, it’s ferocious and easy to get hurt. So, good or bad, Mr. McCain promotes the good side without cautioning us of the bad. His method of invoking this competition will bring prices down as he states. The method will also neutralize consumer protections. By allowing health insurance to cross state lines, we will see the same result as with deregulation (nullifying state-level consumer protections) in the banking and credit industries. The industries simply filed some paperwork in states that didn’t have regulations to escape the consumer protections in all the other states. In the same way, the health insurance industry will escape every other state’s consumer protection mandates.

The risk here, is that the health insurance industry will have to play ‘lowball’ in order to compete. They’ll lower their selling price by offering inadequate health insurance. Uninformed buyers (most of us) will rely on this inadequate coverage without knowing the dangers, then find themselves devastated when disaster strikes.

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