This new post by Wendy Mariner appears on the Health Affairs Blog as part of a series stemming from the Sixth Annual Health Law Year in P/Review event held at Harvard Law School on Tuesday, December 12, 2017.

Congress has been busy enacting and proposing changes to the Affordable Care Act (ACA)’s regulation of private health insurance, from repealing the tax on individuals without minimum essential coverage to the Alexander-Murray bill intended to shore up the private market. These changes do not play well together. Three reasons are explored here: the great wall, which divides advocates with different goals; whipsawed insurance markets, in which insurers are simultaneously pulled in different directions; and, of course, the cost of care, which each reform shifts onto different entities.

The Great Wall

A great ideological wall makes it almost impossible to reach national consensus on whether or how to regulate private insurance markets. The wall divides people—especially in Congress—who believe in personal responsibility for one’s health care costs from those who believe in social responsibility for many such costs or social solidarity. The former believe that you are responsible for your own health and you should be free to buy (or not buy) health care and health insurance as you choose. In this view, health insurance is a commercial product that is properly priced according to actuarial risk. Ideally, competition among insurers can produce affordable products of reasonable quality.

Those who favor in social responsibility for health care believe that health depends on more than personal behavior; it depends on the social determinants of health, including education, income, occupation, housing, and environmental factors. This view recognizes that illness is not always predictable and millions of people cannot afford needed health care. (Many also believe that access to health care is a human right as set forth in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.) In this view, insurance is not a commodity, but a method of financing health care that should be available to all in need, and therefore a social responsibility. To enable everyone to have access to affordable care within a private market, government must regulate private insurers (and providers) more extensively than would be necessary in a public insurance system. […]

Read the full article here!