BuckeyeBlog

It must be nice to be liberal advocacy group Families USA. Whenever they put out a report light on facts and heavy on rhetoric blasting the free market they get friendly media play from coast to coast. Their latest report, attacking the fact that some insurance policies aren’t as heavily regulated as Families USA would like, got the usual uncritical coverage from Ohio newspapers.

Kevin Lamb, of the Dayton Daily News, leads with this: “When Ohioans don’t buy their health insurance through employers or other groups, they usually don’t have very good insurance.” He doesn’t even attribute that to Families USA. He simply states it as a fact. The Cleveland Plain Dealer is even worse, claiming that the individual health market is “still the wild, wild West” in its headline. Clearly they did not intend that as a compliment (although those of us who are originally from the West don’t see that comparison as a bad thing).

What is being discussed here is the individual insurance market, which is the market in which individuals who do not have health insurance through work can purchase insurance. This market is governed by state law and has a variety of regulations on it. For the folks at Families USA, though, there doesn’t seem to be any state that has enough regulation. Viewing government action as the only way to help consumers, Families USA fails to understand that consumers are better served when companies have the freedom to design policies and set pricing that appeals to a variety of consumer interests.

Families USA also fails to understand that more regulation increases the price of health insurance. There favorite regulation — forcing companies to cover everyone regardless of health status — is a sure-fire way of dramatically increasing insurance prices. If insurance companies are forced to cover people whom these companies know will run up thousands of dollars in medical bills, they will raise rates for everyone. That means fewer people will be able to afford insurance. Yes, there is the issue of what to do about people who have conditions that makes health insurance unrealistic for them, but forcing companies to cover them is an inefficient way of doing this.

In the end, this Families USA report is the usual brand of shoddy research and pro-government advocacy that is the hallmark of their work. But some reporters thrive on that sort of thing, so don’t look for any critical coverage.

Tags: Health care, Regulation

This entry was posted on Friday, June 13th, 2008 at 12:58 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.