For the past year, politicians have whined about greedy insurance companies, high premiums and a broken health care system. They claim the recently passed health care bill will solve all these problems and much more. However, the real problem with insurance companies and the cause of high costs has been big government.
Three things need to be done to fix health care. First, Congress must amend the McCarran-Ferguson Act to allow interstate competition in health insurance.
We can't have a free market in health insurance until Congress eliminates the antitrust exemption protecting health insurance companies from competition.
Second, Congress should make it so that the exclusive regulator of insurance companies will be the state where the company's home office is. That's the only way to bypass idiotic state mandates, requiring all insurance plans offered in the state to cover, for example, the Zone Diet and sex-change operations.
Finally, Congress should prohibit the federal government from regulating insurance companies, except for normal laws and regulations that apply to all companies. Instead of insurance companies jumping to the tune of politicians bought by health-care lobbyists, they would jump to the tune of hundreds of millions of Americans buying health insurance on the free market. In addition to saving taxpayer money and providing better health insurance, this plan also saves trees by being 2,199 pages shorter than the Democrats' plan.
Freed from onerous state and federal mandates turning insurance companies into public utilities, insurers would be allowed to offer a whole smorgasbord of insurance plans, finally giving consumers a choice.
Ryan Mattson
sophomore-secondary education
