Friday, March 27, 2009

Daily on Insurers

Stella Daily of ReasonPharm points out that the recent news articles on the insurance industry's latest capitulation to government controls should read:
"Insurers offer to start charging healthy people more",
rather than:
"Insurers offer to stop charging sick people more".
As she notes:
...Two insurance giants, America's Health Insurance Plans and the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association, have written to senators indicating that they are willing to phase out premiums that vary by prior health history if Congress requires all Americans to purchase coverage.

That is bad, bad news for healthy people like me.

It's key that the insurance companies are making this offer in exchange for forcing everyone to be covered -- because that's the only way this scam will work. If insurers don't charge more for higher-risk people, then they simply have to raise costs for everyone. But that would mean health insurance would be an even worse deal for healthy individuals than it already is -- and healthy Americans would flee.
As she pithily concludes:
Let's not shackle the healthy to pay for the sick.
For more on the problems with mandatory insurance, please see my earlier article from the Fall 2008 issue of The Objective Standard:

"Mandatory Health Insurance: Wrong for Massachusetts, Wrong for America"