[Owen]

>>
The difficulty here is that many folks would sensibly refrain from buying health insurance until some major illness arose.
>>

I think I disagree with this, and this is the focus of your objection. Group plans for employers cover everyone. Individual policies would be bought by those who choose to buy them. Yes, maybe this hurts the insurance industry, but that's what the industry targetted tax cut is for.

I am not invested in my own suggestion. My only focus here is to get the GOP recalibrated. Health Insurance used to be something that was not a conservative issue. It has to become a conservative issue NOW or we will lose 2008. I think it may be the #1 issue of 2008.

[sitetest]

Dear Owen,

"Group plans for employers cover everyone. Individual policies would be bought by those who choose to buy them."

This implies that you're looking for the group plans to subsidize the individual plans.

For a variety of reasons, this might be problematic. I'm not sure that it would fly in every state, that insurance commissioners would uniformly permit this. As well, insurance companies who did this would be at an extreme disadvantage in trying to be competitive in the group market, as their group plan rates would be driven higher compared to those who refused to subsidize individual plans through group plans.

But without the subsidization, individual plans would become death spirals. They would start out with sick folks and high premiums, and as folks were driven out of the plan due to cost, only the sickest would be left, thus driving up the premiums.

I agree, though, that the political party that at least appears to offer an acceptable plan will be a big winner.

I'm not sure, though, that many of the suggestions I see put forth really address the biggest underlying problems.


sitetest