RSS Feed MenuSen. Ron Wyden has sold to the Democratic leadership an amendment that would enable more employees to cash out their employer-provided benefits and buy their own insurance policy on a health exchange.
This seems a great idea – and even more, a great idea for conservatives. Remember, it was conservative economists who established the case for the irrationality of the whole employer-provided benefits system. It’s been a crazy feature of this year’s debate that conservatives keep backing themselves into positions they did not believe two years ago and won’t believe two years from now. Now we are in the ludicrous position of opposing curbs on Medicare spending, opposing global budgeting for health systems, opposing studies of comparative effectiveness -and championing the employer-provided system that Milton Friedman regularly excoriated as the source of all trouble in the American health market.
Why is it left to a Democrat like Wyden to press for individual purchase within a prudently regulated health marketplace?
JonF // Nov 23, 2009 at 9:37 pm
Re: What I’ve heard some of my fellow conservatives advocating is to ban recession and pre-existing exclusions
Well, I wish we could ban “recession”. (Sorry, couldn’t resist). But we could get rid of the current practice of recission easily enough; in fact it’s already illegal, it’s just that the law in question has no teeth (though judges are usually quite displeased when cases involving recissons come to court and the insurers get the book thrown at them. Problem is, too many sick people do not have the resources for such a fight). Any insurance company writing an individual policy should simply have to do its homework up front to check into the subscriber’s pre-existing conditions. In today’s digitalized world this should be easy. Auto insurers do this; how many drivers have their policies rescinded after they have an accident? This doesn’t happen because the companies check driving records when they issue policies. And health insurance companies even have their own database where they store patient info for this precise purpose. So let them do their due diligence and then, if they issue a policy, they should be required to honor it (absent court-worthy evidence of actual fraud). I can think of no other business that is allowed to renegue on its contracts in such a manner, outside a bankruptcy court. Any health insurer that does so should not just have the book thrown at them, but the whole dang law library.
balconesfault // Nov 23, 2009 at 11:47 pm
JonF – the problem is that in the absence of comprehensive health databases, and medical privacy laws that don’t have a corollary to driving records, insurance companies “due diligence” involves asking the insured to report any pre-existing conditions.
And if someone does not have a perfect memory for everything that was ever recorded on one of his medical charts … he is liable for later denial of claim based on pre-existing conditions that were not fully disclosed.
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