The Individual Mandate is Popular with Insurers
11/19/10
By Hadley Heath
Imagine that! Health insurance companies are focusing their lobbying efforts on keeping the individual mandate. They claim (like so many other ObamaCare proponents) that the law wouldn’t work without it.
This claim is probably true. The health insurance market continues to function poorly. There are too many players and too many rules involved in a complex system. Some Americans want to opt out of that market entirely. But now, they won’t have that choice! And insurers who support the mandate, as I’ve written elsewhere, are like Christmas-tree vendors who would favor a Christmas-tree mandate.
From Bloomberg news, about the possible undoing of the mandate:
For insurers, eliminating millions of potential customers while keeping other aspects of the overhaul would be a "nuclear nightmare," says Robert Laszewski, president of Health Policy and Strategy Associates, a consulting firm that works with insurers. It would leave insurers without the extra revenue to cover higher costs from the law's ban on the denial of coverage to people with pre-existing conditions or charging sicker patients higher premiums. "It's the No. 1 lobby issue in the insurance industry right now," says Laszewski.
If the law wouldn’t work without the mandate, and the mandate is a huge affront to constitutional rights, maybe it’s time to go back to the drawing board on health reform. I’ve got news for the insurance companies: Just because a law benefits you doesn’t make it a good law. The government does a great job helping certain groups at the expense of other groups, but I don’t think that was our Founding Fathers’ vision.
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