Wednesday, February 09, 2005
Kansas Insurance Commissioner on "allowing the market to work its magic"
[Karen Pallarito, "States Urged to Ensure Health Insurance for All," Forbes, 8 February 2005.]
Here is a good article featuring both recent Flint Hills speaker Greg Scandlen and Kansas Insurance Commissioner Sandy Praeger addressing a new Harvard School of Public Health report urging universal coverage. The latter's comments represent quite a dramatic shift from her endorsement of the Kerry health plan last year.
Scandlen's response:
"These ideas are just horrible," asserted Greg Scandlen, director of the Center for Consumer Driven Health Care at the Galen Institute in Alexandria, Va.
New Jersey, which enacted stricter regulations more than a decade ago, is a prime example, he said. A healthy 25-year-old male with a $500 deductible health insurance policy pays about $450 a month for individual coverage, more than three times what his counterpart would pay in Iowa, which has much less stringent regulations in place, the Harvard report shows.
What's more, the number of uninsured in New Jersey has been increasing quite dramatically, according to Scandlen.
"My contention is the market is broken because of the regulatory policies that groups like this have pushed for the last 20 years," he asserted.
Praeger's take:
Praeger, who chaired the National Association of Insurance Commissioners' Health Insurance and Managed Care Committee last year, praised the Harvard report for nicely laying out the problems in the individual insurance market and offering possible solutions. But those ideas probably won't stick in an environment "when less regulation, and allowing the market to work its magic" tends to be the favored approach, she said.
[Karen Pallarito, "States Urged to Ensure Health Insurance for All," Forbes, 8 February 2005.]
Here is a good article featuring both recent Flint Hills speaker Greg Scandlen and Kansas Insurance Commissioner Sandy Praeger addressing a new Harvard School of Public Health report urging universal coverage. The latter's comments represent quite a dramatic shift from her endorsement of the Kerry health plan last year.
Scandlen's response:
"These ideas are just horrible," asserted Greg Scandlen, director of the Center for Consumer Driven Health Care at the Galen Institute in Alexandria, Va.
New Jersey, which enacted stricter regulations more than a decade ago, is a prime example, he said. A healthy 25-year-old male with a $500 deductible health insurance policy pays about $450 a month for individual coverage, more than three times what his counterpart would pay in Iowa, which has much less stringent regulations in place, the Harvard report shows.
What's more, the number of uninsured in New Jersey has been increasing quite dramatically, according to Scandlen.
"My contention is the market is broken because of the regulatory policies that groups like this have pushed for the last 20 years," he asserted.
Praeger's take:
Praeger, who chaired the National Association of Insurance Commissioners' Health Insurance and Managed Care Committee last year, praised the Harvard report for nicely laying out the problems in the individual insurance market and offering possible solutions. But those ideas probably won't stick in an environment "when less regulation, and allowing the market to work its magic" tends to be the favored approach, she said.
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