Posted on 11/12/2013 5:43:13 AM PST by SeekAndFind
The wave of health insurance policy cancellations reminds me of the gas lines in 1979. Once a week I took a gas break instead of a lunch break so I could fill up my car with gas. Lines were shorter in the middle of the day than in the morning or evening.
Then Ronald Reagan was elected president. He took away President Carter's price and regional allocation controls on gasoline, and the lines vanished overnight.
That's what we need to do with health insurance-take off the federal controls on health insurance. Tell the insurance companies they can issue any policies they like for the foreseeable future, subject to state regulation, and then people will get their policies back.
Even then, it will take companies a few months to configure new insurance policies and go through the state regulatory process of having them approved. Some states might be able to help by speeding up the approvals.
Bills currently moving through Congress would allow insurance companies to issue 2013 policies through 2014 as a temporary remedy to the cancellations. This is insufficient, and just delays the problem for a year. If you want to keep your plan, you should be able to keep it past 2014.
As everyone knows by now, the health insurance policies that are getting cancelled cannot legally be issued under the Affordable Care Act. Just as in the 1970s, when it was illegal to sell gasoline for more than the federally-mandated maximum per gallon, now it is illegal to sell certain health insurance policies.
(Excerpt) Read more at realclearmarkets.com ...
Insurance makes a unnatural market allowing the providers to charge unrealistic prices for services rendered.
Democrats cannot permit insurance companies to create more marketable and transportable policies. Someone has to pay for Obamacare. Healthy people must be forced to pay more so that things like contraception, preventive medicine, and sex change operations and people with “preexisting conditions” can be covered.
Consider how much more an insurer would have to charge if people could buy auto insurance after an accident or policies were mandated to cover oil changes and tires! The only way Obamacare works is to force people to participate and pay in far more than some (most?) of them really need.
Those price controls and allocations were put in place by Nixon and William E. Simon as the first Administrator of the Federal Energy Office. They were kept in place under Ford and Carter.
Given the absurd gymnastics that hospitals and doctors must go through to actually collect their payment from insurance, they could likely cut their fees 50% or more by going cash fee-for-service.
Back in the day,( yes, I'm that old), we could have a gall bladder removed on the easy payment plan. Today, even that operation would be like buying a new Astin Martin on a WalMart salary. I'm not sure how many doctors today would take chickens for payment either.
Funny story about the gas lines. I graduated from high school in 1972 and lived in the Seattle area. I don’t remember the gas lines. It was just a news story for me. But the reason:
I worked as a janitor for the car repair shop and gas station at J.C. Penney’s at Southcenter and got off work at the same time the place opened for business. I would park my Vega GT at the pump, and then fill up before I went home.
At the time, I didn’t really think about how much grief I was saving myself. It was just how I got gas. The result is that I never lived the lines. It was something that happened to “everybody else”. On a side note, my wife is still amazed that the Vietnam war did not affect me or anyone in my family or circle of friends. Must be a weird “parallel dimension” thing.
The real answer is to do away with insurance and let the free market take over.
Insurance makes a unnatural market allowing the providers to charge unrealistic prices for services rendered.
Given the absurd gymnastics that hospitals and doctors must go through to actually collect their payment from insurance, they could likely cut their fees 50% or more by going cash fee-for-service.
I know a guy who went to a specialist to get his elbow fixed. He was using his own money. The receptionist insisted that he needed to be referred to them by another doctor. She couldn’t grasp the concept of him being able to hire her bosses services with money out of his own pocket, just as you would take your car to a specialist if you knew a gas station with a little garage was the wrong place to start.
2 or 3 times a week, I'd get up at 3:30 to get in a gas line....the only saving grace was the sadistic laughing bastard in the little "pay me" house at the exit - without fail he'd screw up when making change. Sometimes I'd get more back than the bill I'd handed him --- did I feel guilty, or did I correct him? NFW; not in the mood after crawling through his two hour line.
Yes, and like Nixon's 55 mph speed limit, Carter will get the blame, because it seems like something Carter would have done.
In PA we had odd/even days for gas, so if your plate ended in an odd or even digit, you could only buy gas on those assigned days.
My wife and I had cars with one odd and one even plate, so every night, at 3:00 AM I would take the correct car to the Turnpike, drive up one exit and buy the allowed $5 worth turn around drive the other direction and buy $5 at the gas station on the opposite side and go home, and siphon the gas from my wife's car to mine {or into a 5 gallon can that I kept as a spare in my trunk.
I was an over the road salesman, and not having gas meant not making sales, and not eating.
We had grown very fond of eating.
Until the evil is exorcised from the White Hut, articles like this might as well start with, “Once upon a time, in a land that time forgot ...”
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