Auto Insurance Quotes | Life, Health and Home Insurance

As Harry Reid’s 2,000 page health-care bills are being rammed through the senate, most of the public debate has been focused on its expanding coverage, not only its now defunct public option, but also its high taxes. Lost in the shuffle have been its intensely coercive requirements on health insurance insurers, especially in the individual and small group markets. Taken together, these constraints are likely to drive them out of business and run a foul of the constitutional guarantee that all regulated industries have to be reasonable, risk-adjusted, rate of return on their spent capital. The perils of the Reid bill are made clear in a recent Congressional Budget Office report that focused on the bill’s rebate program, which holds that once an insurance company spends more than 10% of its revenues on administrative expenses, its customers are entitled to an indefinite statutory rebate determined by state regulatory authorities subject to oversight by the secretary of health and human services. Worse still, the statutory discount is only the tip of a larger regulatory iceberg that permeates the bill. Normally, insurers have the strength to underwrite-to choose their line of businesses, to select and to price risks and to decline unattractive risks.