FixHealthCarePolicy

New York Post Editorial: Reform Leads to More Uninsured

In an editorial in the New York Post, former HHS Secretary Michael Leavitt and Pacific Research Institute senior fellow Jeffrey Anderson detail how the Senate Finance Committee bill would reduce the number of insured Americans. By mandating that all Americans get health insurance at the same price or face fines that are considerably lower, the two argue most Americans would pay the fine until they got sick or injured. The problem is that everyone else’s health insurance premiums would jump, they said.

“Every American deserves to have access to an affordable insurance policy, and there are people with prohibitively expensive preexisting conditions who can’t afford coverage and need help. But there are ways to solve this problem that wouldn’t dramatically raise everyone else’s premiums. And there are far better ways to solve the problem than to give millions of insured Americans a strong incentive to quit carrying insurance year-round.”

Tags: health insurance premiums, individual mandates, preexisting conditions