Making Health Care Mandates Work, and the Insurance Industry Goes after Doctors who Help the Uninsured
Welcome to this installment of the Weekly Health Insurance News Roundup. In this installment we will look at a couple of different, yet interesting articles covering health insurance, the first dealing with mandates. Now since Massachusetts implemented their own health insurance mandates over the last couple of years, many lawmakers have looked to them as an example of how to adapt their system to a national level. CNN has an article entitled, "Health care mandates: How they work" discussing this as well as other fundamentals of mandates.
What it ultimately comes down to is the risk pool, and getting everyone into it. As Linda Blumberg of the Urban Institute put it, "When I'm healthy, I help pay for the sick, and when I'm sick, then healthy people help pay for me." This means that, in a mandated system, everyone contributes in some way to everyone else's health insurance coverage. This, in theory, will keep costs low for those who are healthy yet allow those who aren't to get the coverage they need when they need it. While health insurance companies, unsurprisingly, are fully behind this plan, there are also those who are against it, such as Michael Cannon of the Cato Institute who insisted, "Mandates are about hunting down those healthy people and forcing them to pay -- it's a tax on the healthy."
The article then goes into how mandates work for those who can pay for the required insurance and those who can't. Those with employer-based health insurance would be unaffected, while those who could afford to purchase their own health insurance would be mandated to do so or pay a tax penalty. Those people who couldn't pay for it would be subsidized by the government, creating much discounted premiums. Would this work on a national level? As of right no now one can say, but it's a workable theory and one that, if garners enough support from lawmakers and the industry, could see implementation.
On another topic, our other article this week is entitled, "Insurance industry goes after docs who help the uninsured" and comes to us from SFGate.com. This article discusses how so-called "concierge doctors" are being hounded by the health insurance companies for offering their services to people who don't have health insurance. What is a concierge doctor? According to the article, they sign up people for a fixed amount per month, which grants them access to medical visits with no appointments or wait times. The prices for these services range from $39 to $139 a month, which is fairly inexpensive.
According to the article, "It turns out, some of these free-wheeling docs got sick and tired of waiting for Washington to solve the healthcare crisis, and decided to offer their services for the same price - even if the patient did not have catastrophic (or other) insurance coverage." Sadly, health insurance companies have noticed, and are accusing these doctors of pretending to be insurance companies themselves, though not needing to comply with laws that govern the insurance companies themselves. This has led to an argument on both sides about who is allowed to give care. It's not been resolved yet, but we're going to follow it because it's quite interesting.
This concludes this installment of the Weekly Health Insurance News Roundup. Until next time, have a safe, happy and healthy day.
