The article from the Washington Post can be found here.
With the Affordable Care Act coming into the scene in the recent weeks, there was a push that the government made trying to set up non-profit insurance companies. They wanted to create some competition in the market against insurance companies that many feel are taking advantage of their clients. This proposition was a hopeful success, originating from the Senate and being reviewed and changed some by Congress, but it looks like it may not work. There has been a lot of trouble getting funding for them, and a couple have already closed down. This would leave a lot of people who had opted into those programs with medical bills to pay, and the funding for them would have gone to waste.
I think that this was a daring move by the government. I would love to see some competition against insurance companies of all kinds, lowering the prices but allowing for us to also be insured. Just recently there was a flood in my house and it has been disturbing to see the amount of dishonesty, from the insurance companies, and the reviewer (who was going to have to lie to get us any money). It is sad to me that there has to be so much deceit and corruption in a program that is designed for the benefit of others. The same is true for medical insurance companies. They will find any loophole that they can to cover as little as possible. I think that while these programs may be failing, they present a good point. We need competition. That is how a free market works. If we do not get some sort of opposition to the already present and very powerful insurance companies, then we will just have insurance rates increase, while corruption causes our coverage to decrease.
I agree that we need competition in a free market. But do we really want the government making that competition? Do we not trust ourselves enough to make good competition in the free market? The competition needs to be made in the industry itself, not in the government. Government programs are so often lower quality that private programs. We want higher quality insurance, so we shouldn't have the government make these programs.
ReplyDeleteIn the case of insurance, the free-market interests, profit, is seriously divergent from the ideal societal interests, better insurance (greater quality and greater quantity). Hence, since the free-market in this particular case doesn't do the job requisite of it in order to form a more perfect union, the people, with the government as representative, have to intervene in the free-market and regulate it. If the intervention requires injecting the market with synthetic competition, then I see no reason why that would be detrimental to the insurance consumer-market; it would simply allow more innovation to occur.
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