Any health care financing system that divides health care funds into separate risk pools inevitably experiences adverse selection. In fact, private insurers do all that they can to see that their own risk pools contain low-cost healthier individuals while shifting higher-cost individuals into other public or private risk pools. As this article indicates, numerous regulations can be introduced that may reduce the magnitude of these differences, but they can never be eliminated.

Everyone needs to read this book. Order your copy now. (I’m ordering ten copies – to share with others.):

The conclusions and recommendations presented during the Families USA conference call were based on polls and focus groups conducted by Herndon’s research partners. In spite of Herndon’s positive spin, the research confirms that the Obama administration and the Democrats in Congress face a very “challenging environment” as they attempt to sell the benefits of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

One of the most egregious offenses of the health insurance industry has been to retroactively revoke an insurance policy after the insured individual files a medical claim, a process known as rescission. Public outrage over this injustice helped to drive the process that brought us the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA).

The National Business Group on Health represents primarily Fortune 500 companies and large public-sector employers with self-insured health benefit programs. Because of their market power and their ability to eliminate the risk pooling function of private insurer intermediaries, you would think that these large employers would be immune from the high health care costs inflicted on the rest of us by our dysfunctional system of financing health care, but you would be wrong.

The National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC) has finally come to agreement on the reporting form that likely will be used to determine whether or not the private insurers are in compliance with the required medical loss ratios (MLRs). The agreement is being reported as a victory for health care consumers and a defeat for the private insurance industry, but this ignores the crucial overriding issue.

This five-nation study of the impact of the financial crisis on usage of routine medical care demonstrates that both a decline in employment and a decline in wealth are strongly associated with reductions in medical care. But once again, the United States is an outlier.

WellPoint’s phenomenal business success has been largely due to its ability to offer competitive premiums by limiting what it has had to pay out in health care benefits. Will WellPoint’s business model continue to be viable?

It is no secret what the Democrats under the leadership of President Obama did when it came time to fix our health care system. They left the big corporations in charge of the health care funds. The report on the very high compensation for the top executives of the nation’s five largest for-profit health insurance companies at a time of double digit premium increases leaves no doubt as to who the financing infrastructure is designed to benefit. It is a sickening example of our national priorities which result in a massive transfer from the ordinary people to the wealthy.

Had President Obama and Congress selected an improved version of Medicare to provide stable, life-long health care financing for everyone, they would have eliminated the injustices, inequities, and especially the instability of the double contracting processes required by the private insurance model of health care financing.