The Ailing Health Insurance Markets

This is a pretty good article with good points about the health care system. It mentions that competition is not a good thing in a market that uses people's health and conditions to maximize their profits. As I said, it makes good points. The problem with the health care industry is those people that the insurance company determine are uninsurable. That is really the ONLY problem with our health care system right now. There are people who the insurance companies will not insure because of the risk of financial loss to the insurance company. The competitive nature of the markets would actually encourage companies to discriminate.

If this problem is addressed with some sort of risk pool, the problem of health care - or at least access to health care will essentially be solved. Other than that, you really need to look into the costs of health care in order to lower the insurance premiums that people pay to competitive companies. Enjoy the article. I did.

The Ailing Health Insurance Markets

How to fix the problems of health insurance is a hot topic, these days, honest, and I want to chip in before the elections are over and we forget all about its importance. While Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are offering competing plans which would cover the forty-seven million uninsured in this country, John McCain has a proposal to cut health care costs by increasing competition in the markets. His idea is that competition would drive the price of insurance so low that most everybody could afford coverage! No need for the government to poke its nose where it is not wanted, and the conservatives surely don't want it meddling with the markets.

There's a sense of deja vu about McCain's proposal. Haven't we been injecting competition into the health insurance markets for a very long time? Even the establishment of the government Medicare and Medicaid programs in the 1960's had a pro-competitive edge, because it removed from the commercial markets the most expensive and the poorest paying cases, leaving them with the most lucrative consumers to insure. The Health Maintenance Organization movement of the 1970's was another injection of that competitive hormone into the insurance markets in the form of prepaid group plans which combined insurance with the provision of care. What additional forms of competition has McCain invented that health economists never dreamt about?

Continue reading the article here.