Another Unpublished Letter to the New York Times!

Your recent editorial Insurance Policies Not Worth Keeping seeks to excuse President Obama's seeming deception regarding the ability of citizens to retain their high deductible health insurance plans (he "misspoke" your editors concede) by disparaging these plans as "sub-standard." In effect, the president may have not been entirely accurate, but he can be forgiven because such catastrophic coverage plans are so terrible. Leaving aside the question of the president's truthfulness, characterizations of these plans has been blatantly deceitful. 

Let's start with the fact that such plans have been offered for sale for years. Insurance companies selling such plans were required to file the policy details with each state insurance department which then approved the plans for sale. We are now to believe that suddenly, because of the bright light of the Affordable Care Act, the dirty business of high deductible plans has been exposed. What of those state insurance commissioners who approved such plans in the first place? How many have been asked to explain how they could have repeatedly allowed such "sub-standard" plans to be offered for sale? How many have been called upon to resign? The truth, of course, is that such plans were entirely legal and filled a demand in the market. 

In the debate over the ACA the argument was made that in the same way that individuals are obligated to buy auto insurance, the requirement to buy health insurance cannot be seen as an overreach by the government. Whether or not one believes such a comparison has merit, it is undeniably true that auto insurance policies can be purchased with a wide range of deductibles for loss or damage. An auto policy with a high $1000 collision damage deductible is no more "sub-standard" than a health insurance plan with a $10,000 deductible. What both have in common is that they were approved for sale by insurance regulators and freely purchased by individuals who weighed the trade-offs between price and exposure to loss. 

RedStateVT