About this Book
Making health insurance in the U.S. more affordable and portable have been public policy challenges for many years. During the 1990s, many states experimented with forms of community rating (charging everyone the same price regardless of their age, health condition, etc.) and forms of guaranteed issue (must offer a policy if someone is willing to pay the premium) on health insurance companies that sell to the “small group” market (typically businesses too small to self-insure).
Eight states--Kentucky, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Vermont, and Washington--went even further, imposing those laws on companies that sell to individuals as well as to groups.
Ten years have passed, enough time to tell what impact these laws have had. During 2004, in eight consecutive issues of Health Care News, a national monthly newspaper about health care in the U.S., Conrad Meier presented data and man-on-the-street opinions that present a clear and compelling picture of what has happened in these states. He finds that guaranteed issue and community rating, when applied to the individual insurance market, causes rates to rise, the number of insureds to decline, and the number of companies offering individual health insurance to fall.
This book, which collects all eight feature stories and includes some newly updated statistics, is a valuable contribution to the national debate over health insurance regulation and the future of health care in the U.S.Published by the Council for Affordable Health Insurance and The Heartland Institute.
|
About the Author
 Conrad Meier, one of the nation’s leading advocates of market-based reform of health care, passed away unexpectedly on March 18, 2005. He was 69 years old.
Meier was a senior fellow for the Chicago-based Heartland Institute and founding managing editor of Health Care News, the Institute’s monthly newspaper devoted to consumer-driven health care. Each month for three-and-a-half years, Meier conveyed his ideas about health care reform to every state and national elected official in the U.S. and thousands of civic and business leaders and subscribers.
During his career, Meier was a feature writer for Williams and Wilkins medical journals, Missouri state chairman of the health insurance committee of the National Association of Life Underwriters, assistant in research at the Center for Advanced Social Research, University of Missouri-Columbia, and a columnist for Broker News and National Health Underwriter. Copies are just $8.95 each plus applicable sales taxes. Volume discounts are available. To order, call 312/377-4000 or order online at http://www.heartland.org.
Meier wrote and edited hundreds of articles as managing editor of Health Care News from its founding in March 2001 until he stepped down in October 2004 to become a Heartland Senior Fellow. Many of those articles can be found on Heartland’s Web site at www.heartland.org.
|
