Injury In Idaho

Crossing State Lines: Will it Help or Harm Health Coverage?

On October 12, 2017 President Donald Trump signed into law new Federal guidelines for healthcare coverage that may be sold with less regulation across state lines. Many Republicans believe this will result in cost savings. Democrats point out that that most insurance companies are for-profit and will not offer the comprehensive coverage consumers want unless they are mandated to, and that in some cases insurance coverage rules can influence whether lives are saved or not. It’s common for patients with complex and expensive conditions like cancer before Obamacare was put in place to be dropped from insurance due to “preexisting condition” loophole or told they had reached the coverage’s “lifetime maximum coverage.”

Indeed the Republican controlled Congress have found that healthcare is a passionate, divisive issue seeing their two attempts to fully repeal and replace Obamacare not get the votes needed to pass. After this President Trump decided to use executive orders to reform health law.

According to Eric Zorn of the Chicago Tribune, “Once again, Trump is incoherently spouting bad ideas. The beloved healthcare market forces dictate that such competition would be a race to the bottom — similar to the de-regulatory battle that saw nearly all major credit card companies end up located in Delaware, Nevada and South Dakota, where the credit-banking laws are the most lenient. If this idea becomes law, states would cede their authority to license and regulate health insurance to whichever small, ideologically conservative state would give insurers the most latitude in which conditions and patient groups they have to cover, when they can withdraw coverage, how solvent they have to be, how they settle disputes and so on. Would some customers get a better deal that way? Sure. Younger, healthier people would probably pay dramatically lower premiums for bare-bones policies adequate for their demographic group. Middle-aged and less healthy people would probably pay dramatically higher premiums if they could find coverage at all, thus making worse the coverage gaps and disparities that the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) attempted to address.

From Zorn’s viewpoint, the other “across state lines” option is to have the federal government create a comprehensive set of national health insurance regulations to prevent a race to the bottom and allow insurance companies to engage in price competition on a level playing field from coast to coast. He implies in his recent editorial that politics is being played, rather than picking the best ideas that can promote the common good when it comes to important issues such as healthcare. Some medical malpractice cases have explored if the patient’s type of insurance was a factor in whether they received quality care or not. If you are concerned you or a loved one may have received inadequate medical care because you are uninsured or covered by Medicare or Medicaid, call an attorney, like a personal injury lawyer, today.

 

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