The result is a stew of contradictory and often counter-productive incentives facing patients, insurers, and health care providers. In Kentucky, the combination of community rating, price controls, standardized benefit packages, guaranteed issue, and patient access laws has created chaos in the states health care system. Health insurance companies are in the business of insuring health care risks. Anyone suggesting insurers routinely dump or levy large rate increases to those who get sick while insured is distorting economic and historical facts. Prompt and fair payment of claims is the sine qua non of a financially successful insurance company.
Health insurers have qualification standards.
They must, or they would cease to meet their obligations to policy holders. The flight of insurers from Kentucky is clear evidence that the regulatory burden has risen too high. We do not force banks to guarantee-issue mortgages to anyone who applies, and to do so without a credit check and without a statement of personal financial history. Under such restrictions, a bank would be forced to raise its interest rates so high few people could afford them, thereby reducing the supply of mortgage dollars for homeowners and probably destroying the residential marketplace. But according to the 1996 U.S. Census Bureau Health Insurance Coverage update, Kentucky has a 15. 6 percent uninsured rate, an increase over the last 3 years.