Schwartz LTE On Public Option
By Paul Hsieh, MD @ 4:01 PM   
Brian Schwartz just alerted me to an LTE of his which had been published in the October 30, 2009 Denver Post.
The topic was the so-called "public option":Health care reform and the public option
Say your neighborhood deli rigged its scales so that customers who paid for a pound of meat left the store with less. Does such fraud justify a government-run "public option" for delicatessens?
Surely not, but this is how Colorado AFL-CIO Director Mike Cerbo argues for a new government-run insurance plan. Cerbo says it should "impermissible" for insurers to "drop coverage due to pre-existing medical conditions" -- presumably when patients had been honest about medical histories.
This is called "post-claim underwriting," and it violates the insurer's contract with the policy-holder. But this is no justification of a "public option." Rather, if it happens frequently and without penalty, it shows that government has been lax in one of its legitimate duties: enforcing contracts.
Brian T. Schwartz, Boulder Labels: Insurance, LTE
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