Daily Archives: December 19, 2019

A case study in the pitfalls of free market health insurance

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Seems like it was just the other night I was writing about a certain candidate who believes the cure for the health care crisis is to give insurance companies free rein. A Thousand Flowers Will Bloom, goes the fantasy. Problem is, when you let your garden grow, you get a thousand flowers and a million weeds.

A classic example of this was (briefly) in the news earlier this month, when the Vermont Department of Financial Regulation imposed its largest-ever fine against an insurance company.

The offender, Companion Life Insurance of South Carolina, was fined for selling cartoonishly bad health care policies to Vermont college students between 2014 and 2016 without ever seeking the requisite DFR approval. If the policies had been submitted to the state, they would have been found in violation of both state and federal law.

The policies did not cover most of the medical conditions that commonly befall college students: athletic injuries, mental health coverage, substance use treatment, immunizations, preventative screenings (including for STDs) and contraceptive management.

This is the kind of thing the Meg Hansens of the world see as the bright shiny free-market future of health care. Fortunately for us, we do regulate insurance.

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I’m sure David Zuckerman is shaking in his boots

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Hey, everybody! Meet Meg Hansen, writer, consultant, low-budget TV show host, and now a Republican candidate for lieutenant governor.

Hansen is a bright young woman with a compelling backstory who you might recall as a communications staffer for the Vermont House Republican caucus in 2016-17. After that, she spent about a year as head of Vermonters for Health Care Freedom, the right-wing advocacy group that’s had no discernible influence on the health care debate. Otherwise, Hansen’s public activities are largely confined to the off-hours of community access television.

She is a devout conservative who believes in the power of unfettered capitalism to float everybody’s boat. Her vision would remake Vermont along the lines of America’s reddest states.

“The American Dream is alive and well in states like Texas and North Carolina but not in Vermont,” she writes on her campaign website. At the risk of being churlish, I’d ask if she sees the American Dream doing well in states like Mississippi and Kansas, which have low taxes and little regulation but are economically stagnant.

She’s opposed to Obamacare and other health care reform efforts; her solution is to let the free market do its magic — giving all Vermonters the chance to buy overpriced, crappy, exception-laden insurance policies. She’s not a fan of fighting climate change or climate activists, who “use the specter of climate catastrophe to demonize us as polluters-parasites on earth,” and whose proposed solutions are “immoral.”

She also favors the “freedom to vape,” which, okay then.

You get the idea. It’s precisely the kind of hard-core conservative platform that’s been a consistent, lopsided loser in Vermont.

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