I know there's a lot of information overload going on, so I thought I'd add to the confusion with two more possibilities. What do you think of this trust? Unlike Yglesias, I think people who have to decide what insurance is right for them are invested in researching as much as possible.
http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/archives/2009/06/jay-rockefellers-good-idea.phpJay Rockefeller’s Good Idea
Matthew Yglesias
As I said below I like what Jay Rockefeller is proposing in terms of a robust public plan with reimbursement rates based on Medicare. But Ezra Klein points out that Rockefeller also has another good idea in his Consumer Health Choices Act, namely to create something he calls America’s Health Insurance Trust. The idea here is to help get around the fact that when you start a new job and are picking your insurance options, there’s generally very little available information to help you make an informed choice:
The trust would be a nonprofit corporation staffed by experts chosen by the well-respected Government Accountability Office. The trust would conduct surveys, pore over claims data, and rate plans on administrative expenditures, affordability, adequacy of coverage, consumer claims processing (including timeliness), consumer complaint systems, grievance and appeals processes, transparency and customer satisfaction. The ratings would be as simple as possible, with letter grades. All the information would be available online, on the same sites where people would choose their insurer.
It is, in other words, a good and obvious idea responding to a real need in the marketplace. I’d guess that it’ll be overshadowed by the public plan portion of Rockefeller’s bill. But whatever happens with the public plan, both parties should be able to agree on the inclusion of something like this consumer-oriented trust. The health insurance market will never work unless people have access to the information and choices that would allow them to identify and reward high-performing companies.
I’m not sure I’m really as excited about this as Ezra, since I’m pretty sure that even if there were great information available most people would mostly ignore it and the market would remain pretty dysfunctional. Still, I could be wrong! I don’t see how this could possibly make things worse, and it could make things much better.
On a loosely related note,
part of what’s wrong with the world is that the very same people who spend a lot of time cheerleading for free markets and donating money to institutions that cheerlead for free markets—businessmen, in other words—are the very people who have the most to gain from markets being totally dysfunctional. The absolute worst place on earth you can find yourself as a businessman is in the kind of free market you find in an Economics 101 textbook. As a market approaches textbook conditions—perfect competition, perfect information, etc.—real profits trend toward zero. You make your money by ensuring that textbook conditions don’t apply; that there are huge barriers to entry, massive problems with inattention, monopolistic corners to exploit, etc. So
when it comes to something like health insurance, you have people on the left who want public policy to aim at replacing the market with publicly run entities and you have people in the business community who want public policy to aim at making the market as dysfunctional as possible. So you get what we have, which sucks.Rockefeller is, basically, trying to get us out of that bind and make a better-informed, more-competitive market. And good for him.
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Rockefeller’s Public Plan Outline Relies On Medicare Plus Rates
http://wonkroom.thinkprogress.org/2009/06/10/rockefeller-public-option/
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