Any candidate that suggests such a scheme only shows how unsophisticated he and his advisers are when it comes to understanding how the insurance markets really work––or could work.
I gave a speech to 750 health insurance brokers and consultants in DC last week.
When selling health insurance across state lines, something Trump and a number of other Republican presidential candidates have been pushing, was mentioned the audience literally laughed. That’s what health insurance professionals who spend their days in the market think of it!
This is about as dumb an insurance “reform” idea as has ever been proposed.
This is nothing more than an attempt to take the market back to the days of cherry picking risk––figuring out how to sell policies to only the healthy people. If this were ever enacted it would only serve to shuffle the healthy people into one set of health insurance policies and the sick into another thereby driving down costs for the healthy and in return just driving costs up for the sick––and accomplishing nothing toward fundamentally making insurance cheaper.
People who promote the idea are targeting the many state benefit mandates that drive health insurance policy prices up. The idea is, after the federal Obamacare mandates are repealed, to allow the sale of cheaper policies from states with the fewest benefit mandates to be able to be sold in high mandate states––thereby encouraging the state with more mandates to curtail them.
But if their aim is to eliminate many of these “excessive” state benefit mandates with a federal law, why not just curtail these mandates in all of the states with a federal law? If they are going to stick their federal noses into some of the states that have traditionally regulated insurance, why not just go ahead and stick their noses in all of the states at once and create a level playing field while they are at it?