Health Insurance Quotes Won’t Necessarily Be Lowered With Cooperatives
The Senate Finance Committee is coming close to figuring out a healthcare reform bill according to Maggie Guo’s article on The Ethiopian Review site. Health care cooperatives are still on the table, which has the idea of building large groups so that the price of expensive medical costs are spread out among members to reduce costs for everyone.
But Consumer Watchdog says this will not necessarily lower health insurance quotes for consumers. They say that in practice there has not been enough members for cooperatives to carry out their function and people with less medical risk often opt out of joining.
For a cooperative to be effective, member enrollment would need to be near 500,000 consumers according to some estimates. There have been attempts in Texas, Florida and Colorado without much success. There is also the concern that if small states get together to create bigger groups, then health insurance companies may insist on a suspension of state regulations because of the different types of customers they would be serving. This would in turn cause a whole new type of oversight and possibly a lack of proper regulation.
