In his speech to Congress last night, President Obama grounded his health reform plans two contradictory claims. First, President Obama insisted that health insurers were increasingly denying health care to their clients. Then, he argued that America was suffering from a crisis of rising health care expenditures.
More and more Americans pay their premiums, only to discover that their insurance company has dropped their coverage when they get sick, or won’t pay the full cost of care. It happens every day.…Then there’s the problem of rising cost. We spend one and a half times more per person on health care than any other country, but we aren’t any healthier for it. This is one of the reasons that insurance premiums have gone up three times faster than wages.
Obama’s argument betrays either ignorance or a willful disregard for economic reasoning. If insurers engaged in wholesale jettisoning of their most expensive customers, their costs would fall. An insurance company with lower costs would be able to capture more market share from its rivals by lowering its prices. Those rivals would be forced to compete either by matching the new lower premiums or competing in quality – i.e. by indulging in less rescission!
Health care premiums are rising, so we can safely assume that more, not less, health care is being delivered by insurers. To argue that both costs and rescissions are increasing simultaneously is to deny the basic reality of free market competition. Radical overhauls of the health care system should not be grounded in this populist fantasy.