America’s dysfunctional healthcare system needs some urgent fixes:
Cassidy notes a fundamental problem with the Affordable
Care Act:
“One of the big
problems that insurers are facing is that too few healthy people, and too many
sick people, are signing up for the plans sold through the exchanges. For
insurers, that changes everything. Faced with higher claims per enrollee than
they expected, they seek to raise their prices, which makes healthy people,
especially young healthy people, even less likely to sign up the following
year. If unchecked, this process could lead to a spiral of rising prices and
falling enrollment.
An obvious way to
address this problem would be to drastically raise the fines that people face
if they don’t purchase insurance.”