America's Ailing Health Insurance Markets

This article looks into different ways that the presidential candidates address health care in America. It is a general article that goes over the problems with the health insurance system, but it doesn't offer any solutions. At the end it does question whether or not insurance is the appropriate model to deliver health care in this country. It is a fair question that does not have a good answer. Here is the article.

America's 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 déjà 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?

The truth is that not all competition is helpful to consumers. I know that this is not an idea free-market conservatives like, but it's possible for competition to actually hurt some consumers.

Continue reading the article here.