What worries me most about the article linked in that last post is the response of the AHIP.
A curt “no”?
Without some form of push back on private insurers, be it vigorous competition, regulation, or DEcreased tort reform (yes), and placing them back in the arena of antitrust regulation, they are going to continue to be the insurance version of soldier ants, eating anything that crosses it’s path, and endlessly hungry for more.
The great irony is, the public option isn’t going to be terribly cheap. What it will be is fair, and even-handed, and free of market corruptions. Most people don’t see the doctor very often, and don’t need that kind of access to specialists.
What a robust (but somewhat spendy) public option will do is likely SAVE insurers money. The very few really sick people would choose the public option. Some of them will work for employers who themselves like to have access to good care and have excellent private coverage. The rest will be folks who overall aren’t terribly expensive to insure. Given the rates they’ve been charging due to covering all these chronically ill folks, they could drop premiums AND see a vast increase in profits.
So why are they sulking?
They had visions of eating the whole pie (via mandated coverage) so now having to share isn’t such an appealing option.
That is something to think about further, isn’t it? Why would insurers want to insure sick people? Altruism?
More likely they had a game plan. They figured out a way to game the rules that they were hoping Congress would pass. In fact, given the millions they’ve spent lobbying Congress on this issue, they likely wrote much of what they were hoping Congress would pass.
So what if they had to cover everyone via mandated coverage? What if there were no threshold on how much they could charge, and no limit at which you could opt out?
That would mean some folks were paying 30, 40 or 50 thousand dollars a year. Or more.
By my estimation, we could charge every working human in this country an additional 10% in taxes, and provide Cadillac care to all of them. I don’t know about you, but the version the AHIP was dreaming of seems like a scam.
So what happens when people realize they’ve been roped in to mandatory insurance coverage, and they have no outside option, and the unexpected happens and they are roped into paying the vast majority of their income in insurance premiums?
Given the power the AHIP has been able to buy with their ill-gotten gains, what happens when they have that much more gold to rule with? If they have a guaranteed source of more income, how do we fend off their advances when we realize they are the corporate Medusa? What then?
