The health care bill passed in the House would have repealed this, but the one in the Senate would not have.
Today, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said:
"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.
"Repealing this exemption is an important part of that effort. Today, there are no rules outlawing bid rigging, price fixing and other insurance company practices that will drive up health care costs and often drive up their own profits as well."
Advocates of the repeal argue that the current exemption has allowed health care companies to divide the country into "local monopolies"
Opponents of the repeal, however, point to the state regulations still must follow. They believe that a complete repeal is unnecessary.
Obama's plan also calls for the secretary of Health and Human Services to work with a seven-member board made up of doctors, economists and consumer and insurance representatives to review the recent premium hikes.
I'm pretty undecided on this issue, and I don't have a lot of background information. Will this really make a huge difference in health care? I agree that insurers shouldn't be exempt from antitrust laws, but I don't really understand the difference this would make. Would premiums drastically go down? What do you think? Will this make a big difference on the insurance market? Is it just Obama's latest battle against privatized health care?
4 comments:
Well my dad is an insurance agent, and he tells me that even though there are so many people that don't have healthcare, private insurance companies still keep their premiums high and each year they profit millions of dollars from health insurance. Hopefully repealing this antitrust exemption could fix this corruption. Getting rid of the antitrust laws would make way for competition among insurance companies hopefully lowering the cost of health insurance. While public healthcare has its drawbacks, I do believe that healthcare should be provided for everyone. This can be done by having private insurance companies lower their healthcare costs which can be achieved through repealing this antitrust exemption. So to answer your question Katie, yes, i do think this will make an impact on the insurance market, and hopefully it will make healthcare accessible to more people.
I agree that these antitrust laws could have a positive effect. Since many people oppose a public option for healthcare, Obama needs to come up with a way to lower the private insurance companies' premiums. I think this strategy is doing what is best with what can be done.
McCarran-Ferguson was originally designed to empower both the federal government and the individual states so that they could act to prevent insurance companies from becoming abusive monopolies.
How ironic that it has instead enabled the health insurance industry to achieve exactly the opposite result because the federal government has chosen not to pass legislation targeting insurance monopolies and the states have, for the most part, shirked their regulatory responsibilities.
States haven't gone after obvious Health Care Monopolies because their State budgets are already stretched too thin. Their pockets aren't deep enough to take on the transnational corporations.
Allegations of price-fixing, bid-rigging, exclusive sales contracts, local price cutting to freeze out competitors, and the dividing up of markets need to be fully explored through subpoenas and depositions (a law suit by all 50 States and joined by the Feds) so we can get rid of our dysfunctional corporate health care system that's choking the economy to death. That would be a huge expensive (tax payer funded) law suit.....
Or we could have a buy in option for medicare and provide a little competition to the insurance monopolies.
Hmm what do you think would be more cost effective?
Having antitrust laws is extremely important, because these laws promote competition which then keeps prices down (well, relatively, at least, because we're talking about the insurance industry). If insurance companies were allowed to form monopolies and trusts, and all Americans were required to have insurance (as Obama is proposing), the graph of the demand curve would be a straight vertical line, meaning that despite increasing costs, demand would not change. This would be a terribly corrupt system, and would allow the insurance companies to charge outrageous premiums without losing customers.
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