Albeit, mandatory third party coverage for more services was the antithesis of what should have occurred. Medical savings accounts (MSA) with catastrophic insurance is the only viable option.
It's a good viable option, it helps foment consumer driven healthcare, but it's not the only option.
I told you exactly what the problem is...Guaranteed Issue.
As far as the carriers are concerned, in a normal free-market health insurance environment, the average healthy family should still be able to get $250-500 deductible at a reasonable price. It's the unknown-quantity, deathly-ill, already sick, high-claims patients coming into the pool, that screws up the works and causes premiums to skyrocket.
First of all, and coming at it from the provider side, you must be aware of the main culprit contributing to "medical inflation". Hospitals are NOT providing "free healthcare" to anyone who comes through the doors.
They are cruelly jacking up the costs of procedures and care to insured or cash paying patients. The practice is called Cost Shifting and should be banned absolutely.
They need to fund their "generosity" by some other means.
We need to have a lot more private hospitals and practices. There isn't a single hospital in this state that IS NOT a "non-profit"...participating in the "public-private partnership" scam.
They make plenty of "non-profit" money on backs of the paying patients and taxpayers.
The problem was, and always has been, Politicos forced Hospitals to treat anyone showing up at a medical building. The Politicos never funded the law.
The Hospitals billed those costs to the insurance companies, escalating the cost of everything from pills, to band aids, to syringes.
Slip and fall lawyers, together with bleeding heart judges, piled on to make the problem worse.
The root problem is simple to fix, make people responsible for their own situation, and let charities catch the hard luck cases
That is true, but it is not the fault of the insurance companies. The first round of destructive public policy enactment in the states came as a spin-off of HilaryCare in 1993.
The liberal Northeastern States were a laboratory of how to destroy insurance companies and how to harm the people.
The control-freak RATs have been on this agenda for decades, that being the total destruction of the medical insurance industry. This is to pave the way for their final solution, Socialized Medicine...their term, "single-payer".