Daily News Updates - Health Insurance News

Analyzing the Divergence, Pt.6 – Buying protection with no protection.

Previous…

Another caveat of this free market deregulation of health insurance is the stripping away of state-level consumer protection mandates. The effect here is that every health insurance provider will be able to escape the consumer protection mandates, even those health insurance companies are from within the state. All they have to do is fill out some paperwork and pay taxes to another state which has no mandates. In fact, in order to stay in business in a purely competitive free market, they will have to do that. For details on how simple it is, please refer to the article series entitled: “Paul Revere, but not Robin Hood”.

With few or no regulations of the health insurance industry, we could find our health security heading down the same dead-end street that the housing market took: ‘Fall Street’, or something like that. We may find ourselves purchasing our health insurance from street vendors down on 42nd Street (much like people already do, only legal).

With 25 million Americans already locked into the segment of having inadequate health insurance (‘under-insured’), wither the tens of millions more Americans that will rush at the chance to get cheaper insurance?

With highly respected private foundations like the New York-based Commonwealth Fund and the Kaiser Family Foundation having conducted years of intense health insurance/care studies, we now have a very clear picture of this segment. What they have assessed is that the growth rate of this sector is already up 60% from 2003. This is with heavy regulation. How much worse, without regulation?

Continued…