re: #187 garhighway

It could be that a public option ends up acting as the substandard carrier, taking in all of the high-risk, high cost enrollees. Certainly, that is how the private carriers would want it to happen: they would want to cherry-pick the applicant pool to achieve that. preventing that behavior (which the bill would presumably outlaw) would be a regulatory challenge.

That’s exactly what has happened now with our current system. The highest risk groups to insure are the elderly and the extremely poor. Guess who insures them? That’s right, the Government. The private insurance market is already operating with the benefit of a pool that has the riskiest people removed. And yet they still use rescission and claim denials to avoid paying out claims and pad their bottom line.