Danny, I agree with your comments, but what you suggested about forcing comparability is the law in NJ, insurance companies fled the state when the law was enacted. If such a law is pasted nationally, insurance companies will exit en masse the health insurance industry, again forcing the US taxpayer to pick up the bill, and another route to HillaryCare or some equivalently horrible socialized system.
Why did they leave? Was there something really stupid about the way NJ did it? Or did the insurance companies just not want to compete, and left for greener shores with more confused customers?
I'll tell you the thing I really hate about insurance, especially health insurance. They make everybody else's costs go up.
So many plans negotiate rates on a % below normal that doctors and hospitals raise their rates to everyone else so that they can discount them to the insurance companies. I think that ought to be illegal. In fact, I'm not so sure it is not already in violation of some of the anti-trust laws.
My wife had surgery, The bill was something like $10,000, but the insurance company had negotiated a rate of $5,000. That means if we had decided to self-insure, we would have got stuck with a rate that was twice as high than if we had insurance. That is just WRONG!!!
Yeah this is fishy. If there's a problem with state laws, the answer is changing the state laws, not passing federal laws to "trump" them.
It's bad enough that state governments no longer have representation in Congress, we don't need to accelerate our headlong rush into federal totalitarianism.
All we need to do is allow folks to buy insurance across state lines (or over the internet). That would encourage deregulation in and of itself because companies operating in states with the least regulation would make the most money (kind of like the theory of tax competition).