Buying insurance across state lines is not going to lower the premiums one penny. Very stupid argument. Insurance Companies price health insurance based on the price of medical services where you live. So yes insurance might be cheaper in Oklahoma than Texas but if I live in Texas and go to a company in Oklahoma for my coverage they will price based on my home zip code. So I will be buying my insurance across state lines but the risk is the same so there will be no change in premium. Total non issue. Sounds great but it will have no impact on price at all.
Well scratch that one off my list :)
WHAT did the Freedom Caucus want that they couldn’t get.
That’s the realistic place to start from and how CONSERVATIVE was it that it couldn’t be added.
Trump is definitely very conservative on a lot of issues.
But I think he is less conservative than myself on other issues.
No biggie but HEALTHCARE is because my wife’s post cancer treatments are costing a FORTUNE compared to 3 years ago even.
And i need endoscopic and colonoscopies every 2 years because of precancerous cells
used to be 10 bucks. now TWENTY percent of the whole procedure.
That could be thousands. I’m thinking of doing it myself with a hose and a small cell phone :)
We should drop the whole "tort reform" conversation, too. Tort reform in a Federal health care bill is pointless because malpractice lawsuits aren't filed in Federal court. They're adjudicated in state courts. A number of states have already adopted their own tort reform measures, with seemingly little success in reducing health care costs.
“Buying insurance across state lines is not going to lower the premiums one penny.”
It will lower prices, but you’re correct it won’t be all that remarkable. Auto policies for similar coverage vary in the hundreds. But even the cheapest is still expensive.
And that is exactly why selling across state lines would lower premiums. Those costs of which you speak are burdensome regulatory costs.
When an out-of-state insurance company doesn't have to cover every service under the sun, they can offer a subset of services for a lower price. The current in-state monopolies will have to compete for business that is all but guaranteed to them today.
Economics 101.
Bubba, I understand your point about local costs influencing prices, but I don’t get the impression you are familiar with what the actual, very solid arguments for selling across state lines are. Many states force insurance companies to provide all sorts of expensive types of coverage as a requirement of doing business in their state. If everyone can buy across state lines they won’t be forced to purchase big expensive plans with a ton of add-ons and extra regulations required by their state that they either don’t want or in some cases couldn’t even use (like men and post-menopausal women being forced to pay for coverage of pre-natal care and birth control pills for themselves, for example).
Americans in every state would then have the opportunity to buy cheap minimal coverage if that’s all they want or think they will need, since state laws prohibiting that sort of coverage will now be moot. That should cause a lot of people who don’t want to buy insurance as it is now to opt in. More participants should mean lower costs for the insurance companies and hopefully consumers, while the people will have more options of what cost-level they want to purchase, including inexpensive plans as an option for many more people—inexpensive not because of their local medical costs but because their plans will simply cover less by their own choice.
Doing this will also create more competition by giving people more choices between insurance companies. Free market competition that breaks through state-wide (or any sort of) monopolies is good for consumers and usually lowers prices noticeably. Right now, thousands of counties and even a fair number of states have only one or two health insurance providers, so the companies don’t really have to work and compete much—if at all—for customers. Competition will give these companies incentives to lower their prices and provide more options. Being freed of dealing with 50 sets of often radically different regulations should also encourage more new insurance companies to form, since it will be much cheaper, easier, and faster for them to start doing business nationwide.
These major changes will lower premiums and give the public more choices in crafting the specifics of their own health coverage. Trump himself spent a couple pages really going into this in his 2000 book, The America We Deserve. And before someone starts talking about states rights, interstate commerce is one of the few powers explicitly given to the federal government in the Constitution. This is definitely one of the changes to our health care system I most want to see happen.