In a recent letter to the Wall Street Journal, former Maryland Governor Robert Ehrlich explained why the critics of our “capitalist, free-market” health insurance industry are full of it. Maryland is very typical of all other states in that the state legislature imposes more than sixty regulatory mandates on companies that wish to insure their workers. If they do so, they must offer the services of 66 different medical professions, even massage therapy, or not offer health insurance at all. The same goes for health insurance companies per se. This massive regulatory monstrosity has come about as all of those medical professions lobbied for all the laws and regulations that make it mandatory to cover their services with insurance sold in Maryland. Consequently, it is not possible to buy inexpensive, catastrophic health insurance, or even catastrophic insurance plus a few extras. It’s the whole shebang or nothing at all, by law.
Private health insurance in America is made extraordinarily expensive by regulatory red tape. The quickest way to make health insurance more affordable is to completely deregulate the industry and allow a genuinely free market to operate.
Politicians don’t want to do it, of course, since they would then no longer be able to extort campaign “contributions” from all those special-interest medical care/service providers. They prefer to lie about the “evil, capitalist health insurance industry” instead.
