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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Katelew who wrote (129608)	1/29/2010 1:26:21 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541933

Something else I have suspected was being overstated in the debate surrounding HCR was the ability of insurers to drop people after they get sick. I know fraud, such as hiding a pre-existing condition or a habit like smoking, will enable an insurer to drop folks, but I think there are laws in place in every state to prevent insurers from just dropping anyone they choose after they start losing money on that person's illnesses. Do you know anything much on this? A little, but not a huge amount at this time. I believe there are laws against such activity, but then there are ways around them. Mostly for legitimate things, that could reasonably cause someone to be dropped, but OTOH, "fraud" can be in the eye of the beholder. Making a false statement on an application can be considered fraud, but there can be so much to cover, that for some it might be hard to get all the information right. In more general terms, whatever you set the policy in terms of how tight the regulations are in terms of whether health insurance companies can drop people, there are going to be cases, that people can find and promote, where people are legally "screwing" someone else. Make the policies too lose and some people will be dropped for questionable reasons once they get sick (concerns for reputation mitigate this problem, but you will be able to find some examples), make the policies too tight and you subject insurance companies to fraud. There is no perfect "just right", that will preclude all abuse. Even with very lose policies, fraud against insurance companies will go on anyway and some will get away with it, even with very tight policies about who can be dropped, some people will be unfairly dropped. Because of that we can't legislate to the special case, you have to look at the overall system. Of course saying that doesn't give us the answer for the overall system, but I think even beyond this issue, there is a problem with the way some individual case that gets a lot of publicity will end up driving law.