Healthcare Reform, Insurance Industry Style

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

Over at the Wonk Room, Igor Volsky notes that AHIP, a healthcare insurance trade group, has finally announced its position on healthcare reform:

Specifically, by enacting an effective, enforceable requirement that all Americans assume responsibility to obtain and maintain health insurance, we believe that we could guarantee issue coverage with no pre-existing condition exclusions and phase out the practice of varying premiums based on health status in the individual market. While we support transitioning to a reformed system in which health-status-based rating is no longer used, rating flexibility based on age, geography, family size, and benefit design is needed to maintain affordability.

Volsky is pretty unimpressed, but I guess I feel slightly more generous toward this proposal than he does.  If AHIP is serious, this represents a philosophical concession that’s worth having.  Unfortunately, the devil is in the details.

AHIP says that in return for making insurance mandatory, the industry is willing to guarantee coverage to everyone, regardless of health status.  But check out that last sentence, which is a loophole big enough to drive an EMT ambulance through.

I’ll grant them family size as a reasonable criteria for premium flexibility.  Obviously a big family should be charged more than a single person.  But age?  Health issues rise rapidly with advancing years, so it would be fairly easy to avoid the worst risks by simply making premiums rise dramatically after age 50.  Geography?  Everyone knows that poor people tend to have the worst health, and obviously they cluster in low-income areas.  Benefit design?  Every health insurance company understands where the costs are in the system.  If plans with decent coverage of expensive chronic conditions like diabetes are priced out of reach, then nobody will buy them even if, technically, the premium isn’t based on health status.

Now, some of this is simply fodder for regulation.  Maybe you can set minimum standards for plan benefits, or limits on how fast premiums can increase with age. But as Volsky points out, AHIP’s position today isn’t really very different from its position in 1992, which it abandoned at the first sign of political opportunity.  Liberals, including me, have a fond hope that the political scene is different today than it was in 1992, which might keep AHIP from bolting, but recent events suggest that Republicans are pretty likely to adopt the same “Just Say No” strategy this year that they did during the Clinton administration.  It’s possible that the political scene hasn’t changed as much as we think.

Bottom line: AHIP’s statement is better than no statement.  It’s progress of a sort, especially if they’re serious about it and willing to accept reasonable regulations on how it gets implemented.  We’ll see.

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with The Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with The Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate