Why buying health care across state lines is a terrible, terrible idea.

[Wiseacre]

I'm not getting this, must be missing something. If I live in CA and I buy a HC policy from a company based in NY, the terms and conditions tell me what my coverage is no matter where I am. Same as auto or home insurance, the home state of the issuer doesn't mean squat.

The home state of the issuer means everything in this instance. Auto insurance, besides being a simpler and less important product than health insurance, has to comply with the laws of your state. You can't buy a policy from a company based in another state simply with the goal of finding one below your state's regulatory minimums. That, however, is exactly what's being proposed for health insurance. That's the entire point of the "across-state-lines" legislation." It invalidates state consumer protections, undercuts state law, and empowers insurers relative to consumers.

It's not about "competition," whatever that's supposed to mean in this context (competition is never fostered by a disjointed, opaque, or chaotic marketplace) and it's certainly not about magically importing the lower cost of another state's provider market into your geographic area (that would be like leasing an apartment from a property management company headquartered in Skokie because you think that'll get you a cheaper apartment in downtown Chicago).

It's about letting insurers design the playing field on which they play and segment their risk pools to their hearts' content. Some folks will benefit at the expense of others from stacking the deck in the insurers' favor; they're generally the ones cheerleading for this approach the loudest. But there isn't much redeeming value to the proposal.

First of all, I would think there would be a national minimum in terms of coverage, with sufficient consumer protections. If a state has higher requirements than whatever the national minimum is, then any carrier that wants to sell a policy in that state would necessarily have to meet those conditions, otherwise they're not allowed to sell their product there.

Don't know where you get the crap about insurers tilting the field in their favor, if the law is done right then there won't be any cheating or favors. And spare me the nonsense about the repubs vs dems inthis regard, anyone except for the most ideologically bent knows full well the dems are every bit as bad as the repubs when it comes to favoring big biz and the rich in their own districts. I realize you lefties just love to hammer the insurance companies, but this is ridiculous. This is by far a much better solution than allowing some faceless bureaucrats decide who gets what treatment and for what cost. Clearly you don't seem to know the first thing about what competition means and the value it can play in providing the best products and services for the lowest price.

 

[PoliticalChic]

I'm really glad you guys have magical boxes to see in to the future and know which illnesses you're going to contract. Sadly, most people don't have the clairvoyance you all seem to manifest.

This post demonstrates the vast gulf that separates those of us on the Right from the cradle-to-grave-afraid of responsibility statists.

I believe that it is my responsibility to plan for my future. It is not government's function to insist that I prepare for every eventuality.

Certainly, as an educated individual, you have read "Democracy in America," by Alexis de Tocqueville.

You might recall that he warned of the seductive embrace of big government. It seems that you have accepted same.


He said this:

Alexis de Tocqueville, writing “Democracy in America” in the 1830’s, described “an immense, tutelary power, which takes sole charge of assuring their enjoyment and of watching over their fate.” As he predicted, this power is “absolute, attentive to detail, regular, provident, and gentle,” and it “works willingly for their happiness, but it wishes to be the only agent and the sole arbiter of that happiness. It provides for their security, foresees and supplies their needs, guides them in their principal affairs, directs their industry, regulates their testaments, divides their inheritances.” It is entirely proper to ask, as he asked, whether it can “relieve them entirely of the trouble of thinking and of the effort associated with living.”


Taking responsibility for one's life builds character, and a stronger nation.

Surely, you agree.

 

[starcraftzzz]

-----I'm really glad you guys have magical boxes to see in to the future and know which illnesses you're going to contract. Sadly, most people don't have the clairvoyance you all seem to manifest.------

This post demonstrates the vast gulf that separates those of us on the Right from the cradle-to-grave-afraid of responsibility statists.

Yes helping people, increasing living standards and improve the economy is being afraid of responsibility

I believe that it is my responsibility to plan for my future. It is not government's function to insist that I prepare for every eventuality.

I see so you oppose the government making people responsible

 

[ThinkCritically]

I see so you oppose the government making people responsible

The government can't make you responsible any more than it can make you get up out of bed every morning and brush your teeth. Hell yeah I oppose the government making people become responsible....because its impossible....the government can make you do anything. It can enforce the law and give consequences for braking the law, but it cannot create responsible behavior. The very word responsible implies a level of personal accountability.

 

[PoliticalChic]

-----I'm really glad you guys have magical boxes to see in to the future and know which illnesses you're going to contract. Sadly, most people don't have the clairvoyance you all seem to manifest.------

This post demonstrates the vast gulf that separates those of us on the Right from the cradle-to-grave-afraid of responsibility statists.

Yes helping people, increasing living standards and improve the economy is being afraid of responsibility

I believe that it is my responsibility to plan for my future. It is not government's function to insist that I prepare for every eventuality.

I see so you oppose the government making people responsible

This is the second time you've done this....

That quote is not mine, you dolt.

Learn how to post....

 

[starcraftzzz]

-----
I see so you oppose the government making people responsible--------

The government can't make you responsible any more than it can make you get up out of bed every morning and brush your teeth. Hell yeah I oppose the government making people become responsible....because its impossible....the government can make you do anything. It can enforce the law and give consequences for braking the law, but it cannot create responsible behavior. The very word responsible implies a level of personal accountability.

ROTF clearly you've never heard of the health insurance mandate, or retirement account mandates

 

[ThinkCritically]

-----
I see so you oppose the government making people responsible--------

The government can't make you responsible any more than it can make you get up out of bed every morning and brush your teeth. Hell yeah I oppose the government making people become responsible....because its impossible....the government can make you do anything. It can enforce the law and give consequences for braking the law, but it cannot create responsible behavior. The very word responsible implies a level of personal accountability.

ROTF clearly you've never heard of the health insurance mandate, or retirement account mandates

I have heard of both...how does it make you responsible when you hand over your sovereign right to make consumer choices regarding insurance. And how does it make you responsible when the creates retirement account mandates. Sound to me like deferring responsibility to the government, which eliminates personal accountability, thus eliminating responsibility.

 

[Skull Pilot]

Can anyone tell me why it matters if your doctor gets a check reimbursing him for services from an insurance company in a different state?

 

[EdwardBaiamonte]

Liberals think that a Free Enterprise Restaurant would maximize its profits by selling empty plates as dinner.

See? Save on material and pocket the profits!

Yes their IQ is essentially non-existent. There is just no other explanation.

Whats interesting is that the whole idea of state management grew out of the McCarren Furguson Act which was designed to protect a very corrupt and abusive liberal monopoly in Georgia. As a result the whole nation now has the same inefficiency and corruption that Georgia had.

 

[Greenbeard]

First of all, I would think there would be a national minimum in terms of coverage, with sufficient consumer protections. If a state has higher requirements than whatever the national minimum is, then any carrier that wants to sell a policy in that state would necessarily have to meet those conditions, otherwise they're not allowed to sell their product there.

You're basing this on what, wishful thinking? The Republican language for the flavor of interstate purchasing they're pushing has already been written. It's present, word-for-word (literally copied and pasted), in at least seven bills introduced in the current session, and it was in several bills in the previous session (including the House Republican alternative to the Democratic reform bills in 2009). Under those bills, health insurers are explicitly exempted from insurance laws and consumer protections in every state in which they operate except those of their chosen home state. As I said, that's the point. These bills are about deregulation.

The version of interstate insurance sales you're describing (minimum national standards and insurers responsible for respecting the laws of the states in which they operate) is much closer to the version of interstate insurance sales that's already been passed in the Affordable Care Act.

I realize you lefties just love to hammer the insurance companies, but this is ridiculous.

I don't love to hammer the insurance companies, they play an important role. But like virtually all individuals and entities, they respond to incentives, and when the incentives they face are broken they're led to unfortunate strategies. Incentive structures are the whole ballgame here and it's only by fixing those that a well-functioning market offering meaningful consumer choices can be created.

Sadly, these deregulatory bills don't do that.

Clearly you don't seem to know the first thing about what competition means and the value it can play in providing the best products and services for the lowest price.

On the contrary. I know exactly what competition means. That's why I support new competitive marketplaces that will allow consumers to make easy side-by-side, apples-to-apples comparisons of plan offerings, all while viewing meaningful cost and quality data on insurance plans. It's also why I support increasing the number of plans available to consumers, both via start-up loans to create new nonprofit, consumer-run insurers in every state and by opening up interstate sales options whereby multiple multi-state insurance plans will be available to consumers.

 

[Skull Pilot]

Can anyone tell me why it matters if your doctor gets a check reimbursing him for services from an insurance company in a different state?

Didn't think so.

 

[Navy1960]

Under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (H.R. 3590), Section 1333 permits states to form health care choice inter-state compacts and allow insurers to sell policies in any state participating in the compact. Two or more states may enter into compacts under which one or more insurance plans may be offered in the such states, subject to the laws and regulations of the state in which it was written,

Out-of-state Health Insurance - Allowing the Purchase (State Implementation Report)

Correct me if my reading of this article is off, but it does appear that a few states are starting to take advantage of this. So if the implication by some posters is in this thread that this is somehow not being advocated or has been dropped , that is not so and is in fact from what I can read part of the ACA.

 

[Bfgrn]

you are certain that bureaucrats and technocrats and autocrats will create....and I'll use the terminology that you mindless Leftists love, 'Utopia.'


Welcome to the worker's paradise......

yes, this is how we got Hilter, Stalin, Mao, the great 20th Century liberals. Jefferson saw them coming 200 years ago,( based on 3000 years of history) and so gave us freedom from all forms of central government going forward. Our goof liberals have lived through it and still they don't see that central government monopolies will be corrupt at best and genocidal on average.

Liberals should be illegal as the Constitution intended.

Here is your lesson for the day...

The antithesis of authoritarianism is liberalism.

While not all conservatives are authoritarians; all highly authoritarian personalities are political conservatives.
Robert Altmeyer - The Authoritarians

What Mao Zedong said about liberalism

革命的集体组织中的自由主义是十分有害的。它是一种腐蚀剂，使团结涣散，关系松懈，工作消极，意见分歧。它使革命队伍失掉严密的组织和纪律，政策不能贯彻到底，党的组织和党所领导的群众发生隔离。这是一种严重的恶劣倾向。

"Liberalism is extremely harmful in a revolutionary collective. It is a corrosive which eats away unity, undermines cohesion, causes apathy and creates dissension.

It robs the revolutionary ranks of compact organization and strict discipline, prevents policies from being carried through and alienates the Party organizations from the masses which the Party leads.

Combat Liberalism - Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung

 

[Greenbeard]

Can anyone tell me why it matters if your doctor gets a check reimbursing him for services from an insurance company in a different state?

Didn't think so.

See the post below yours. Or the one above it. Or most of the last several pages of this thread. There's nothing inherently wrong with what you're describing. And that's being encouraged by policies being implemented now.

The issue at hand is that the "across state lines" proposal being pushed by a certain party corresponds to a very concrete legislative proposal that amounts merely to a deregulation of the individual insurance market (generally in conjunction with efforts to push people out of the group market into the individual market). That's the problem, not what you're describing.

 

[ShaklesOfBigGov]

That's not the problem with selling across state lines. The problem with selling across state lines is that without federal coverage standards, the result is that every insurance company will move to the state with the most lax requirements. Even realize that most credit card offers come from South Dakota? Same principle. Even better for the Republican proposal, they want to define territories as states for purchase of health insurance purposes. Hope you enjoy the consumer protections of the Northern Mariana Islands.

Why should everyone be forced to succumb to your idea of minimum "requirements"? I certainly wouldn't think of standing in your way should you want to purchase insurance that exceeded my idea of maximum "requirements". Can't you just mind your own business?

Why should people not be able to make rules governing behavior? That's the entire basis of civilization. Your proposal would result in no requirements whatsoever. Why should the narrow interest of de facto slave state dictate policy to 300 million plus Americans?

Governing behavior as in telling people what cereals they are allowed to buy, or that juice should be promoted by the Federal Government while soda is taxed to curb behavior? Whatever happened to allowing people to make their own decisions and accepting personal responsibility for the choices you make? Federal Government should not dictate what a person should eat, or what insurance they MUST buy, any more than a government has the right to dictate what faith an individual must believe in order to be deemed a true American.

 

[ThinkCritically]

you are certain that bureaucrats and technocrats and autocrats will create....and I'll use the terminology that you mindless Leftists love, 'Utopia.'


Welcome to the worker's paradise......

yes, this is how we got Hilter, Stalin, Mao, the great 20th Century liberals. Jefferson saw them coming 200 years ago,( based on 3000 years of history) and so gave us freedom from all forms of central government going forward. Our goof liberals have lived through it and still they don't see that central government monopolies will be corrupt at best and genocidal on average.

Liberals should be illegal as the Constitution intended.

Here is your lesson for the day...

The antithesis of authoritarianism is liberalism.

While not all conservatives are authoritarians; all highly authoritarian personalities are political conservatives.
Robert Altmeyer - The Authoritarians

What Mao Zedong said about liberalism

革命的集体组织中的自由主义是十分有害的。它是一种腐蚀剂，使团结涣散，关系松懈，工作消极，意见分歧。它使革命队伍失掉严密的组织和纪律，政策不能贯彻到底，党的组织和党所领导的群众发生隔离。这是一种严重的恶劣倾向。

"Liberalism is extremely harmful in a revolutionary collective. It is a corrosive which eats away unity, undermines cohesion, causes apathy and creates dissension.

It robs the revolutionary ranks of compact organization and strict discipline, prevents policies from being carried through and alienates the Party organizations from the masses which the Party leads.

Combat Liberalism - Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung

Was he referring to classic liberalism or modern liberalism?

 

[ShaklesOfBigGov]

Pretty hard to buy products that no one offers. Why would a company offer a policy to cover things they could make more money by not covering?

Why are we depending upon government to supply us with Health care? Why shouldn't we allow Health insurance companies to compete for our business, and buy Health Care in much the same way as we buy car insurance (as indivduals)? If we carried our own Health Care coverage that we pay premiums for and took it with us from one job to another, rather than depending upon a business to supply it as long as we maintain employment, there would not be the concern for pre-existing conditions now would there? If we allowed companies to compete for consumer loyalty, wouldn't the very nature of competition in a free market impact on how much we are expected to pay? Now add all kind of government "must haves" and "must provide for free", and yes costs WILL most definately go up. Somehow the left doesn't quite grasp the concept that if something is free, that the cost that goes into the production of a product or the provision of a free service, doesn't simply "show up" to be taken care of on its own. Liberal math is always fuzzy, when all they ever concern themselves with is providing for over this little small frivolous detail of cost. Why else do they go through so many CBO projections until they find one that "entertains" their thoughts of Big Government can do it better?

 

[CrusaderFrank]

Why buying bananas across state lines is a terrible, terrible idea
Why buying wine across state lines is a terrible, terrible idea
Why buying cheese across state lines is a terrible, terrible idea
Why buying cigars across state lines is a terrible, terrible idea
Why buying computer software across state lines is a terrible, terrible idea
Why buying coffee beans across state lines is a terrible, terrible idea
Why buying sneakers across state lines is a terrible, terrible idea
Why buying ceramic tile flooring across state lines is a terrible, terrible idea
Why buying tulips across state lines is a terrible, terrible idea

 

[ThinkCritically]

restricting competition over state lines is nothing short of helping health insurance companies to corner the market.....

 

[ShaklesOfBigGov]

That's not the problem with selling across state lines. The problem with selling across state lines is that without federal coverage standards, the result is that every insurance company will move to the state with the most lax requirements. Even realize that most credit card offers come from South Dakota? Same principle. Even better for the Republican proposal, they want to define territories as states for purchase of health insurance purposes. Hope you enjoy the consumer protections of the Northern Mariana Islands.

"...with the most lax requirements."
So?
Only a Liberal would assume that bureaucrats know what's best....

1. With the fewest mandates, therefore cheapest.

2. If consumers deem the company one that fits their needs, they will choose same. To the shock of anti-free market Liberals.

The horror, the horror.

Gas would be cheaper if we still allowed lead in it. Cars would be cheaper if you could sell them without seat belts.

The problem is that you don't realize the market isn't truly free. Most markets aren't perfect competition. Consumers aren't that powerful.

Is that why we no longer have beta machines, turn tables, or 8 track players, the Pinto, or why the Chevy Volt (aka Pinto II) has production issues? The consumer isn't powerful enough to dictate product behavior to corporations on their own? Choice and competition seemed to work out pretty well in the free market in those instances.