Keith Girard. “Health Care: The Case for Mandatory Universal Health Insurance.” All Business. April 2 2009: “As the debate unfolds in the coming months, small business owners will need to get up to speed on the current system’s problems. A recent hearing before the House Committee on Energy and Commerce’s subcommittee on Health provided some eye-opening testimony on the current system’s problems and why mandatory, universal health insurance should be a cornerstone of reform efforts.
“Insurance, in its simplest form, works by pooling risks: many pay a premium up front, and then those who face a bad outcome (getting sick, being in a car accident, having their home burn down) get paid out of those collected premiums,” explained Katherine Baicker, a professor of health economics at Harvard’s School of Public Health.
“Uncertainty about when we may fall sick and need more health care is the reason that we purchase insurance, not just because health care is expensive,” Baicker explained. “It is impossible to ‘insure’ against an adverse event that has already happened, for there is no longer any uncertainty. Try purchasing insurance to cover your recent destruction of your neighbor’s Porsche; the premium will be the cost of a new Porsche. You wouldn’t need car insurance, you’d need a car.”
The same logic explains why insurance companies attempt to weed out or deny coverage to those who are already sick, or have so-called pre-existing conditions. “The reality of the health insurance market is that a carrier’s success depends on its ability to minimize its risk. This means that each company is better off if it only insures people who will not need medical care. This provides incentives to cherry-pick healthy people, and limit the number of unhealthy people covered,” Mila Kofman, Maine’s superintendent of insurance, told the committee.
“Since an estimated 20 percent of people account for 80 percent of health care spending, avoiding even a small number of high-cost individuals can substantially reduce an insurer’s losses,” Kofman noted. “While the desire of insurance companies to reduce risk is rational from a free market perspective, it creates a market which many Americans cannot access. No one competes to insure sick people.”
Insurance works because not everyone will fall sick at the same time, so it is possible to make payments to those who do fall sick even though their care costs more than their premium, by tapping the pooled insurance premiums. Thus, the system is undermined by the uninsured, both healthy and unhealthy.
For uninsured or under-insured individuals who are sick, uncertainty is no longer a factor. They need health care — not health insurance — but lack the money to pay for it, because they lose the benefit of tapping a pool of insurance premiums.
By the same token, when healthy individuals choose to go uninsured, the model breaks down as well, because they are limiting the pool of reserves available for those who are sick. If they wait until they are sick to get insurance, they defeat the purpose of insurance, too. That’s why Massachusetts, one of the states leading health care reform efforts, requires universal participation in its health program.”
Ceci Connolly. “Like Car Insurance, Health Coverage May Be Mandated.” Washington Post. July 22, 2009: “Bringing everyone into the insurance pool — particularly young, healthy customers — spreads the risk and lowers overall costs. ”