I'm questioning it because I don't think it's a good idea, for a number of reasons. The two main reasons are that I don't think it will result in lower prices for insurance, and I think it would actually make billing more complicated for healthcare providers.
I'll take the second one first. Sure, billing would be more complicated if there were, say, five new plans out there than if there weren't. But there are lots and lots of plans and they have always come and gone. Adding a few more options seems to me like a drop in the bucket. And if the five new plans were good ones, then maybe they'd squeeze more than five less desirable plans out of the market, which would mean a net loss of plans and a net drop in billing complexity. I don't get how this can be a big issue unless your frame of reference is single payer in which case more than one payer would be considered a burden. As a delta from the status quo it seems a trivial additional burden, if any.
Re the lowering of prices, I understand that's your conclusion but I don't get it and you haven't explained or supported it. When you first stated that conclusion is was based on incorrect inferences about the proposal. I expected my further explanation to trigger either reconsideration of your conclusion or alternate justification for it. What seems to have happened is that you have simply let your conclusion stand. I find no explanation of why my additional information fell short of disabusing you of it. So I'm left to wonder how it is that the proposal is rejected as a potential cost reducer. It still seems obvious to me that many current purchasers and non-purchasers would jump at an opportunity to buy less costly insurance and that both established and new insurance companies, if given that market opportunity, would develop and offer products. Where a sufficient market opens up, products appear.
One other price-lowering point about the new products that I consider a given and didn't articulate directly is that they would hopefully once again differentiate between insurance policies and prepaid health plans, which is what we continue to mislabel as "insurance." Much of the costly state regulation comes from lumping them together. In some states and in the congressional proposals the only cost options folks have is choosing among several levels of coinsurance on their loaded packages. If we differentiated the products and folks could pick from column A and column B to determine their own loads, they'd get a better price. |
