Cost of Health Care Continues to Rise

[merrylander]

Originally Posted by whell

I'm not sure where you have worked, but this is a fairly common practice in the small group market. The fewer employees, the fewer plan options that are offered, which allows the carrier to better predict the risk / cost for a particular small group.



We can certainly agree on this, though my daughters might object!

There you go again - deregulation, deregulation, was not this last crash sufficient for you? Every recent derugulation has been a disaster. They did it to the airlines - you can't pay me to climb on a commercial flight. They deregulated electricity providers, last year ours hiked their rates 72%. Actually power generation should not be in the hands of private industry, but that is another thread.

Yes, our perspective differs on this. Deregulation a many industries produce change, but I'd submit there are more success stories. Regulated industries by and large prefer to be regulated, becuase it shields those industries from market forces and competition. I've never understood why those who would prefer to regulate certain industries then decry corporate welfare. Regulation is a form of corproate welfare.

The airline industry was regulated for years, and could charge crazy ticket prices to help defray the cost of 1/2 full planes. We got airlines to service smaller markets because of this, but the costs were not sustainable when domestic airlines had to compete with foreign providers for routes, and "upstart domestic carriers" like Southwest were able to fly domestic routes at more competitive rates.

I'm aware of Maryland's deregulation of electric distribution. However, if you've insulated consumers from market forces for years, and then dump them into a market that has been particularly turbulent for several years, it was a recipie for disaster. The argument could certainly be made that if the system had not been previously regulated, Maryland consumers would have seen the same, more gradulal increases that most other markets have experienced.

As for the current financial mess, one could certainly argue that the regulators who should have been minding the store were asleep at the switch, and/or were pushing the market in the wrong direction based on bad policy. Either scenario begs the question: why do we need regulators if we're going to get this type of outcome.[/QUOTE]

Southmessed is OK if you like flying cattle cars, one of my positions involved giving courses all about the country. They once put me on Southmessed to Phoenix. I swear that we landed at every little airport between BWI and Sky Harbour.

We were doing fine until Phil Gramm persuaded Robert Reich that Glass Stegal was bad and Reich got Clinton to sign it away. I would imagine that Ontario Hydro and Hydro Quebec could be considered "regulated" since they are owned by their respective provincial governments, yet they can produce elctricity at half of what companies charge here. They also have very few outages, only expeienced one in the 13 years I lived in Ottawa. Probably just as well for New York that they can produce it cheaply.