Posted on 02/24/2010 2:43:28 PM PST by Former Military Chick
Washington (CNN) -- The House voted overwhelmingly Wednesday to repeal the antitrust exemption currently granted to health insurance companies.
The vote was 406-19 to repeal the exemption, which has been in place since the end of World War II. The 19 who voted against the repeal are Republicans.
Liberal Democrats have said a repeal would help inject competition into the health care industry while reducing consumer costs.
White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters Tuesday that President Obama strongly supports the repeal. "At its core, health reform is all about ensuring that American families and businesses have more choices, benefit from more competition and have greater control over their own health care," Gibbs said.
(Excerpt) Read more at cnn.com ...
Follow the money trail to find out why. My guess is that just one or two Ins. Co.s are big donors to this group.
My thoughts, exactly.
Now, about that no entangling relationships thing...
If you look at the American health insurance industry under today’s current environment (with anti-trust) companies are merging and raising rates because of increasing regulation by states, e.g., pre-existing conditions regulations, disallowance of underwriting before writing coverage, etc.
Repealing the anti-trust exemption does not change the current financial state of insurance payers, it makes the single-payer system almost inevitable regardless or not whether Americans want it. If we want to end up with a giant single payer-plan, we will never get even the services provided by the private companies who have public stock to sell.
How many Americans are employed by the health insurance industry - and their suppliers... soon, unemployed or worse employed by the government, just like the car cos and banks.
the list, ping
Being an expert in this area, I can tell you that this is not what it appears. The antitrust exemption allows small companies to merge their statistics in order to estimate loss costs. That allows more companies to compete. Without that exemption, small companies wouldn’t know whqat premiums to charge, so they wouldn’t compete.
In practice, this kind of merged statistics is very important in many lines of insurance, such as fire or liability, but is not significant in Health insurance. In short, this law will have little effect. To the degree it has an effect, it will be to reduce competition.
Same here Carley....Only think I can think is that the GOP wanted to be able to say that they are not the party of NO and coopertated on a facet they thought needed redone, but didn’t want to support it 100%, so they designated certain “safe” seats to vote yea.....
I just hope each individual Rep wears a wire and catches O underhanded threats and promises.
Well it gets worse. Now the insurance companies will face anti-trust liability for decisions they didn’t make. Remember every state has a state insurance board dictating what insurance companies can and cannot do, even dictating what premiums they can charge. The courts often refuse to allow “the government made me do it” as a defense since you could have opted out of doing business in the first place.
The 19 Republicans who voted against it may have done so just to "pimp" the Democrats.
...”the secretary could overrule state insurance regulators”.....
One guy from BO’s admin. to “overrule states authority” is never a good thing!
Hopefully we the people will control Congress starting in November.
So people like Tom Price, who really understands what this exemption does, voted against it. I’m not surprised.
People, this exemption is there so that companies can share actuarial data so that they can better compute rates. With out that data, actuarial uncertainty increases, therefore risk increases, therefore rates increase.
Brilliant.
At the end of the article it says BOS Czar can overrule the states regulations.
I don’t know enough about it to say, but if the libs and oscuma are for it then I’m agin it.
Ding!
Thomas Sowell does a nice exposition on that, I believe in Basic Economics.
The biggest force for anti-competitive trust-building in health insurance is the Federal government.
The cronyism in the Toyota raid and now this; they are not even bothering to hide their fascist side at all
the only big entity allowed is the Federal Government.
The fascism is coming. This and the Toyota thing. Same day, wow.
Government showing its jack boots.
Unfortunately, I would rather there be no anti-trust legislation at all for any market. Let customers decide. People said Microsoft was a monopoly, but Google took its cake.
The only monopolies our country has known are de facto monopolies that government imposes, such as water, electricity, etc.
Exactly! That’s just what I wrote.
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