New England States Serve as Test Bed for Universal Healthcare
This National Review piece looks at several states attempts at providing more healthcare to more individuals via government intervention:
Vermont, Maine, and Massachusetts all force insurance companies to offer coverage to individuals regardless of health status, an arrangement known as “guaranteed issue.” All three states also forbid insurers to charge different rates based on health status, a policy known as “community rating.” Maine has a form of the “public option,” a government-run insurance plan that competes with private plans and offers taxpayer-subsidized premiums, while Massachusetts has an “individual mandate” requiring everyone to purchase health insurance. Even New Hampshire — sometimes held up as an island of individualism in a collectivist sea — has, when it comes to health care, been swept along with the currents.
Unsurprisingly:
The result: Health care costs more in New England than it does anywhere else in the country. Insurance companies have fled the region, leading to less competition and higher premiums. The number of uninsured has gone down, true, but not by nearly as much as proponents of these reforms had predicted, while health-care subsidies eat up an ever-growing share of the states’ budgets, with the consequences of higher taxes and — yes — rationed care.
While the Obama administration has attempted to sell universal healthcare as a matter of cost saving, many on the left sell healthcare on an emotional level. That’s why the laws that are passed are so beyond basic common sense that they practically parody themselves. For example, you can’t force insurances companies to take on riskier individuals and forbid them from charging these individuals more without adversely affecting the industry. It so obvious that these are bad laws but they have been passed because those on the left appeal to voters emotional side.
Vermont was a trailblazer on this misguided path. In the spring of 1992, the Green Mountain State enacted the nation’s first guaranteed-issue and community-rating mandates for individual coverage. According to an industry-sponsored study undertaken by Milliman, a consultancy, the passage of those laws led many insurance companies to stop offering individual coverage in the state; today, individuals can purchase plans from only two companies in Vermont.
In regards to Vermont, a study found:
In 2006, the Vermont insurance department studied the effects of these reforms on the market for individual health insurance and reached the following unsurprising conclusions: “The individual market seems to be performing badly: the number of people buying such coverage is falling drastically; coverage is unaffordable for many; and the only coverage that is available has very high cost sharing.”
You don’t say. So forcing companies to take on risky individuals and not being able to charge them more has made the overall cost of healthcare go up? Big surprise there.
October 15th, 2009 at 9:30 am
Empirical evidence that universal health care does not control costs from an n=3, including 1 public option and 2 individual mandates. How many more do you think it will take before people finally realize this won’t work? n=15? n=25? Because so far they’re batting .000
October 15th, 2009 at 9:37 am
Those that actually support it don’t do so on the level of cost, they do so on the level of helping others. If they were serious about cost they would support legislation that would allow the markets to breathe freer in healthcare.
October 15th, 2009 at 10:11 am
Insanity.
October 15th, 2009 at 10:23 am
solution - single payer
October 15th, 2009 at 10:27 am
I hope you’re joking.
October 15th, 2009 at 10:51 am
no joke at all. find me one good reason against it.
October 15th, 2009 at 11:02 am
You mean a good reason against single payer?
October 15th, 2009 at 11:12 am
thats what it looks like
October 20th, 2009 at 7:36 pm
“Empirical evidence that universal health care does not control costs from an n=3, including 1 public option and 2 individual mandates. How many more do you think it will take before people finally realize this won’t work? n=15? n=25? Because so far they’re batting .000″
Its rather baffling that you manage to selectively ignore all the countries that manage to produce higher quality health care (by any objective measure of outcomes ranging from infant mortality to life expectancy), at a fraction of the cost, using universal health care. If you want to talk about empirical evidence, socialized health care at the national level pretty unambiguously kicks the crap out of our current system.
Just google ‘list of countries by infant mortality’, ‘list of countries by life expectancy’, ‘list of countries by under-five mortality’, etc. etc. etc. Countries with socialized medicine are always at the top. Meanwhile, according to OECD data, the United State’s healthcare system costs -almost twice as much- per capita as the most expensive universal healthcare nation (Norway), and three or four times as much as many of the other countries that outperform the US system in terms of the objective numerical measurements I described above.
And please don’t try to argue ‘the US benefits from economies of scale, so it makes sense that our system is three times as expensive’, because that’s… kind of backwards.