Imposing Costly Regulation Is Not Real Reform

Jeet Guram / August 27, 2009

President Obama and Democrats in Congress want to impose two costly health insurance regulations nationwide.

The first is community rating, which prohibits insurers from varying premiums based on an individual’s health status. The second is guaranteed issue, which forces insurers to sell policies to everyone at anytime, even individuals who wait until after they are sick to obtain insurance. Community rating and guaranteed issue are designed to raise healthy people’s premiums in order to subsidize the premiums of high-risk individuals.

It is important to work to ensure that high-risk individuals can access affordable coverage. However, community rating and guaranteed issue are such inexact, inflationary, and nontransparent efforts at achieving that goal that they can end up being counterproductive. (more…)