John Cochran, University of Chicago Booth School of Business Professor of Finance, among other positions, is on the right track, but he’s wide of the mark in some critical respects.
The unraveling of the Affordable Care Act presents a historic opportunity for change. Its proponents call it “settled law,” but as Prohibition taught us, not even a constitutional amendment is settled law—if it is dysfunctional enough, and if Americans can see a clear alternative.
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Only deregulation can unleash competition. And only disruptive competition, where new businesses drive out old ones, will bring efficiency, lower costs, and innovation.
That’s plainly true, and he goes on to tout further—correctly IMNSHO—the advantages of a free market in the delivery of health insurance and the delivery of health care services. However, he has some misconceptions in the extent to which those two industries should be allowed to go in a free market.
Health insurance should be…lifelong and guaranteed-renewable, meaning you have the right to continue with no unexpected increase in premiums if you get sick.
This isn’t insurance: it eliminates the concept of premiums being based on the risk being transferred. Or, it is insurance, and the risk being transferred and the fee charged for accepting that transfer (the premium) will be elevated to account for the higher risk involved in that mandated longer-term risk acceptance as well as the changed risk factor represented by having gotten sick. And sick again with the same thing. And again.
Insurance should protect wealth against large, unforeseen, necessary expenses, rather than be a wildly inefficient payment plan for routine expenses.
This is blatantly normative and not at all related to the competition of free markets. There will, indeed, be customers who want policies that cover “routine expenses;” it’s not Cochran’s—or government’s—place to proscribe these because they disagree that such policies have utility.
Rather than a mandate for employer-based groups, we should transition to fully individual-based health insurance.
Again, no. This is another interference with a competitive free market. It’s certainly true that the (tax-policy encouraged) “mandate” for employer-based groups is a distortion of the market. However, rather than simply distorting the market in a different direction, let that market—the individuals who aggregate into that market—decide whether group plans are viable.
Aside from that, there is the matter of preexisting conditions. The only risk that can be transferred here is the timing of the next flare up of the condition. Forcing folks with these conditions onto the individual market will simply artificially elevate the premiums they’ll have to pay for the transfer of that risk. Group plans would allow the risk acceptors, those insurance companies, to spread the timing across a risk pool larger than one, which would allow them to charge a lower premium—with a truly free, competitive market forcing them to compete for the business, and so exerting further downward pressure on the premiums charged.
Current group plans can convert to individual plans, at once or as people leave. Since all members in a group convert, there is no adverse selection of sicker people.
This isn’t a free market—it’s a mandate to move away from a policy structure that many will want to retain, even if the coverages available within a particular group might change under free market imperative. The free market also will handle the question of adverse selection just fine—that pricing matter.
