If I represented an industry that turned families down for health coverage because their newborns are “too fat,” I’d be careful about double-crossing the President and the Chairman of Senate Finance.
I wonder whether the geniuses at AHIP thought carefully about just how hated their member health-insurance companies are when deciding to try to torpedo the health-care reform bill after it had been heavily tailored to buy them off. Â The current system is guaranteed to throw up a series of horror stories, like this one about a family that can’t get health insurance because their newborn is too fat.
Author: Mark Kleiman
Professor of Public Policy at the NYU Marron Institute for Urban Management and editor of the Journal of Drug Policy Analysis. Teaches about the methods of policy analysis about drug abuse control and crime control policy, working out the implications of two principles: that swift and certain sanctions don't have to be severe to be effective, and that well-designed threats usually don't have to be carried out.
Books:
Drugs and Drug Policy: What Everyone Needs to Know (with Jonathan Caulkins and Angela Hawken)
When Brute Force Fails: How to Have Less Crime and Less Punishment (Princeton, 2009; named one of the "books of the year" by The Economist
Against Excess: Drug Policy for Results (Basic, 1993)
Marijuana: Costs of Abuse, Costs of Control (Greenwood, 1989)
UCLA Homepage
Curriculum Vitae
Contact: Markarkleiman-at-gmail.com
View all posts by Mark Kleiman
Looks like they're picking up the kid after all. Check out the update (same link you posted).
Well see, next time your insurance company gives some insane excuse for denying your family coverage just get bloggers and talkshow hosts to make a big issue out of it while major healthcare legislation is being debated and everything will be just fine. That's health insurance regulation we can believe in.
"get bloggers and talkshow hosts to make a big issue out of it"
Apparently Alex's father is a part-time news anchor at a local station and was able to publicize the situation on the air.
If we weren't in the middle of a national debate where you can get ratings by publicizing stories like this, would anyone even notice?
There's also the not-so-minor deal that fixing the problem doesn't excuse the insurance company for having caused it in the first place. Imagine some other kind of business — or heaven forfend an individual — whose first reaction to any bill coming in was to refuse to pay, or to a customer walking in the door was to refuse to serve them on a pretext.