Compromise Co-Op Proposal Won't Lower Costs, Government Study Showed
Sam Stein
HuffPost
The health care reform compromise that centrist Democrats and several Republicans have indicated they'd support has shown an inability to effectively lower premiums for consumers, a newly resurfaced government study shows.
In recent days, a slew of lawmakers, notably Sens. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) and Richard Shelby (R-Ala.), have begun a renewed push to establish health care insurance cooperatives as an alternative to a publicly run insurance plan.
But there's a study at hand that undercuts the argument that co-ops would drastically alter the health insurance market.
The U.S. General Accounting Office produced a report on cooperatives in March 2000 that was mostly sour on the idea. Using five different co-ops as examples, the study concluded that on the key function -- lowering the cost of insurance -- these non-profit insurance pools came up well short.
(More here.)
HuffPost
The health care reform compromise that centrist Democrats and several Republicans have indicated they'd support has shown an inability to effectively lower premiums for consumers, a newly resurfaced government study shows.
In recent days, a slew of lawmakers, notably Sens. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) and Richard Shelby (R-Ala.), have begun a renewed push to establish health care insurance cooperatives as an alternative to a publicly run insurance plan.
But there's a study at hand that undercuts the argument that co-ops would drastically alter the health insurance market.
The U.S. General Accounting Office produced a report on cooperatives in March 2000 that was mostly sour on the idea. Using five different co-ops as examples, the study concluded that on the key function -- lowering the cost of insurance -- these non-profit insurance pools came up well short.
(More here.)
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1 Comments:
How many Republicans would support the Government creating Co-ops considering their opinion of Government involvement with Fannie Mae, Freddy Mac, AIG, GM, etc ?
The Government would have to provide the startup capital. Then where do you get the employees to run it --- most likely experienced insurance and operations managers including some pretty intensive computer information systems. Keeping any co-op of size in financial balance would be rely on the Government being the guarantee ... unless they hand it off to AIG to offset the catastrophic risk which is how we got in trouble before. Co-ops would be very expensive, and very complicated, especially in a quick startup period.
As a fiscal conservative, there is no way that this makes sense.
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