Regression Paper

Regression Paper

There are many individuals that would like for greater government involvement when it comes to health care. There are many Americans that do not have or do not take advantage of the health care benefits offered by many organizations. There are several plans that would attract many individuals. One such solution would be the single payer. With this proposed solution the government would directly pay for or fund various health services.

Another suggestion would be the pay or play plan. With this plan the employers would be obligated to provide a specified level of health insurance for their employees or to pay a tax that is earmarked for providing coverage for the uninsured. Many times it is overlooked the fact that government policy may price many Americans out of coverage and thus contribute to the high numbers of uninsured individuals.

The current insurance system is heavily state regulated at different levels. These regulations require insurance plans to cover specific types of health care providers and or to provide specific types of health benefits. There are other existing state regulations that are affecting the insurance rating while some insurance plans have the ability to exclude clients from being covered. Many insurance companies have been selecting their own doctors, pediatricians, and specialists. They also have selected which hospitals and other facilities that their clients may obtain their services.

The health insurance industry had written the policy to gain control the rising health care cost. The insurance places the limitations on what kinds of services such as mammograms, EKGS, sonograms, and other testing procedures. Some of these policies eliminate clients who high risks such as elders, diabetics, and clients who are already been diagnose with disease.

Health insurances use their policies to balance the cost of high risk clients who pay low cost premium. In the mean time, the healthy clients pay high cost premiums. If there are not enough healthy clients, the insurance companies sometimes suffer a loss which they will need to increase their premiums for the following year. But they must consider how much to increase the premiums so clients may still consider to sign for the next year. "The economic impact of state-level health insurance regulations has generally received little analytic attention from both the academy and the broader health policy community." (New, 2005)

The detailed analysis has provided how lower insurance cost and better health care coverage can be more effective. The study only review certain health insurance which resulted the following: "Only a small subset of the overall health insurance market. In 2000 and 2001, 67.2 percent of the U.S. non-elderly population was enrolled in employer group coverage. Conversely, only 3.6 percent was enrolled in non-group or individual coverage." (New, 2005)

A little academic and policy literature that examined the impact of state-level health insurance regulated health insurance premiums. The history part of the reason was because of the lack of publicly that was available in state data on individual health insurance costs where this started to change.

In January 2005, Mark Showalter, William Congdon, and Amanda Kowalski that had published a working paper that entitled "State Health Insurance Regulations and the Price of High Deductible Policies." It was determined that the authors had used separated datasets in their analysis. It was estimated the Golden Rule insurance had provided 2003 insurance premiums data from a series of random ZIP codes in 37 states and eHealthInsurance.com which was a major broker of health insurance that provided premium data from the insurance policies that were being sold through their web site.

It was determined by the authors who focused on the four types of regulations which mandated heath benefits, where it required insurers to cover particular treatment or particular services. The second, the any willing provider laws that were restricting insurers ability to exclude hospitals and doctors from their networks. The ratings of community laws that were requiring insurers to limit premium differences across individuals were being guaranteed issue laws that required insurers to sell insurance to all potential customers regardless of the health and pre-existing conditions.

These four authors found that each of the four types of regulations that were resulting in statistically significant increase in health insurances and premiums. They also found that were consist on eHealthInsurance.com and the Golden Rule datasets. It was estimated that by eliminating all the regulations could save individuals almost $2,000 per year in insurance premiums.

But overall, it was estimated that regulations had a mixed of impact on health insurance premiums. However, the state regulatory policies exhibited little variances across time which has made it more difficult to reach definitive conclusions about causal