Legal Commentary

Regulatory Capture, Cont'd

By Big Tent Democrat

d-day:

Dan Froomkin now sizes up the insurance industry’s next move, and agrees that they will scrap for every advantage to turn the ACA even more to their advantage[.]

When the focus is on, as it was on the insurance companies' argument that they could elude the prohibition on discrimination against children with pre-existing conditions, the regulators won't be captured. But the Secretary of HHS can not maintain that level of scrutiny, even if they wanted to. And the assault will be constant. Here is the latest:

In the March 17th message, WellPoint — the nation’s largest insurance company — announced that it has reclassified some of its administrative costs as medical spending in order to increase its medical loss ratio (MLR, a techinical terms which measures how much insurers spend on administrative spending v claims).

The inherent weakness of the reforms in the health bills is its dependence on regulators to insure that the benefits that are designed to go to consumers actually do so. the history of insurance regulation is not confidence inspiring.

Speaking for me only

Full post as published by TalkLeft on April 01, 2010 (boomark / email).