Monday Thoughts

There's a lot of good stuff out there today. I'll try to go in to depth with some of this stuff, but please read the links, too.

One of the arguments proposed by conservatives to help lower health care costs is to allow selling insurance across state lines. At first glance, this idea seems to carry a lot of merit. It's cheaper in Idaho to carry insurance than it is in Floriday. So wouldn't it drive the costs down if Floridian's could buy insurance from Idaho? That sounds great, but there are a number of problems with that. One, each state has different requirements to what insurance can cover. Guess what? Idaho has some of the fewest requirements. That's why Idaho is very cheap. So if you decide that this is still a good idea, do you let the Idaho plan get sold in Florida as-is, or do you say that the Idaho plan must meet the minimum Florida requirements? If you choose to go as is, then you run the huge risk of having insurance companies run to Idaho to set up shop, the so called 'race to the bottom' that was experienced in the credit card industry. That's why most credit card companies are based in South Dakota. SD let the companies write their laws and sell card agreements. If you choose the other route, then you could end up with something like how the auto insurance industry is set up, with each company following the different states' rules. But that probably won't bring down the costs as much as conservatives would like to think.

One idea that hasn't been floated much is to charge people premiums based on their current health, excluding chronic conditions, age, and mental illness (stuff that people can't control). So if you smoke, you pay more. If you are over weight, you pay more. Seems to me like that would do 2 things: It would give people a real incentive to be healthy, and make those that aren't healthy pay their fair share.

Listening to conservatives scream about getting Obamacare killed in the courts is a remarkable about-face. Conservatives have always been against 'judicial activism', but now that legislation is getting passed that conservatives disagree with, they can't wait to get into court.

FrumForum has a great bunch of articles out today. This post examines how repealing Obamacare is dumb. It needs to be fixed. I couldn't agree more. This post looks at how the GOP has changed in the last 50 years. It makes a lot of sense to me. Reading the comments section after the post shows just how divisive and fanatical some conservatives have become.