Insurers Allowed to Sidestep Health Insurance Reform

In an article in The Washington Post entitled, “Health insurers could be allowed to bypass some key reforms,” they look at how a Senate proposal would all but ruin the idea of health insurance marketplaces and nearly strangle the idea of any significant change that the reforms are supposed to uphold. According to the article, legislators are trying to create a health insurance marketplace through which individuals and families purchase their insurance through a gateway. The idea is that, by standardizing the way people find health insurance policies, it’ll be both easier and less expensive for individuals and families to attain health insurance. Opponents say it would kill competition, but competition really isn’t working, is it?

Anyway, the issue here is that a Senate provision would allow insurance companies to operate outside of those marketplaces, allowing them to continue their competitive practices as well as changing their pricing to attract younger and more healthier customers, causing prices within the marketplace to rise because all that would be left within it would be those less healthy and sickly, who in turn have more health insurance costs associated with their needs. It would basically limit the change that health insurance reform would be able to affect by basically keeping the same current, broken system in place.

The House’s health care bill, passed a couple of weeks ago almost, would require all health insurance companies to operate within and only within this marketplace, which sounds like more reform and less status quo. It’s hoped by this author that the reform wins out over the status quo, because the status is not quo.